One good thing about sitting in a warm beach chair is that I can think about times when I wasn\u2019t sitting in a warm beach chair.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019ll entertain a little yarn. This yarn conveys that much of what I\u2019ve learned about business came from when I started shoveling snow in junior high school.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have a grand and unified theory to this stuff. I don\u2019t have any profound insights.<\/p>\n
Heck, I don\u2019t even have an elegant narrative.<\/p>\n
But sometimes a few random notes are worth contemplating.<\/p>\n
One winter morning, when I was a kid, I looked out of our apartment window. The neighborhood was blanketed under a fat white layer of fresh snow. To the grownups this was an inconvenience. To me, however, it was an invitation to scare up some action.<\/p>\n
I was in middle school and just old enough to slip away from the home nest without being interrogated about my intentions.<\/p>\n
And I intended to get in the snow removal business.<\/p>\n
I walked downtown to a hardware store to buy a snow shovel. The other customers were hurrying through their business, but as a kid with no responsibilities I had the leisure of enjoying my decision. Hey, if you\u2019re going to buy something, you might as well like what you\u2019re buying.<\/p>\n
And what I was buying was going to cost a large portion of my \u201clife savings\u201d at the time, so I wanted to choose my tool wisely.<\/p>\n
Eventually, however, a clerk started snipping at me for constantly picking up the shovels and handling them. So I snipped right back at the guy.<\/p>\n
Which I\u2019ll rack up as an early lesson in business: It\u2019s awfully easy to get derailed by the antipathy of minions, so you just have to stand your ground.<\/p>\n
After trudging back to my neighborhood, I canvassed the area, offering to shovel the snow from sidewalks and driveways.<\/p>\n
I had no success the first time out.<\/p>\n
The next snowfall came a week later.<\/p>\n
No luck then, either.<\/p>\n
In cold climates, people resent having to open their doors to the inrush of cold air. Being an unsolicited pitch man is not a role for the thin-skinned.<\/p>\n
Anyway, when the third time came around, I was still batting zero.<\/p>\n
So at some point during that gray day I decided to just start shoveling someone\u2019s sidewalk. I didn\u2019t have some grand strategy behind this, I was just sick of being bored.<\/p>\n
Snow shovels make noise when they reach pavement and grate against it. So on an otherwise quiet day people can hear the action. After a little bit of my shoveling, two neighbors actually beckoned me to serve them.<\/p>\n
Talk about a weird inversion of marketing assumptions: When I visited the customers and made my pitch, they couldn\u2019t get rid of me fast enough. However, once I was doing what they didn\u2019t want me to do, and now that I wasn\u2019t pitching anything to anybody, they beat a path to my shovel.<\/p>\n
Go figure.<\/p>\n
Anyway, by the end of that season I had a roster of regular customers. When the next winter rolled around, I pretty much just shored up my action from the first one.<\/p>\n
By the time the third winter came along, I owned a large snow blower, which is sort of like a lawn mover for snow. This thing drank a lot of gasoline and made a lot of noise. Which is to say, it was highly cool.<\/p>\n
There was no fourth winter for me; my family moved to warm California. This was the end of my action in small-time snow removal.<\/p>\n
But there is no shame in small-time. As I was pondering those small-time days I decided to convert my memories into inflation-adjusted terms.<\/p>\n
The result? Well, in terms of today\u2019s dollars, I was making about $30 an hour. This became my rent-and-pizza money in college.<\/p>\n
But college is getting far beyond my context here, so I\u2019ll just hunker down in my beach chair and enjoy the warm sunshine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One good thing about sitting in a warm beach chair is that I can think…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[56,67],"class_list":["post-27511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-business-3","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}