{"id":330,"date":"2006-07-21T08:43:54","date_gmt":"2006-07-21T15:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/2006\/07\/21\/the-entrepreneurial-spirit-a-tribute-to-my-father\/"},"modified":"2018-11-21T09:10:53","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T17:10:53","slug":"the-entrepreneurial-spirit-a-tribute-to-my-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/the-entrepreneurial-spirit-a-tribute-to-my-father\/","title":{"rendered":"The Entrepreneurial Spirit, a Tribute to My Father"},"content":{"rendered":"
My father was an entrepreneur. He was always starting businesses. He was always selling things. <\/p>\n
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When I was very young he operated Steve’s Lawnmowing Service. He also sold World’s Finest Chocolate<\/a>. He carried boxes of chocolate bars with him to church, and sold them after Sunday School. I remember standing on the church lawn, waiting while Dad joked and told stories and sold candy.<\/p>\n He tried lots of other things, too: he was a flight instructor, he sold Shaklee<\/a>, he raised nursery stock. He read personal finance books. (The Richest Man in Babylon<\/a> was one of his favorites.)<\/p>\n Dad’s first real entrepreneurial success came with Harvest Mills, which he started in the mid-seventies. He built a wheat grinder from scratch. He liked it so much that he decided to sell them. He developed a system for manufacturing them in a production line. Then, further capitalizing on the health-food craze, he developed the Little Harvey food dryer. These sold well, and soon he had purchased one of the first plots of land in a new industrial park. Harvest Mills was a success.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dad sold the business in the late-seventies for a large sum of money. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, he never saw full payment for the business. (My memory is this: he sold Harvest Mills for $300,000 payable in ten yearly installments, but the buyer went bankrupt and somehow only one payment was made. Dad, who always had poor personal finance skills, squandered what money he had been paid on airplanes and sailboats, his expensive toys.)<\/p>\n The next six or seven years were tense. The economic outlook in the early eighties was poor. Dad moved from one sales position to another: selling staples, selling industrial supplies, selling boxes. He started other businesses: an accounting service (with software that he wrote in Microsoft Basic on an Apple II), a nursery (again), a wood stove manufacturer. These all failed.<\/p>\n