{"id":533,"date":"2006-10-04T05:00:21","date_gmt":"2006-10-04T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/2006\/10\/04\/i-was-a-grade-school-entrepreneur\/"},"modified":"2018-11-21T09:08:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T17:08:19","slug":"i-was-a-grade-school-entrepreneur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/i-was-a-grade-school-entrepreneur\/","title":{"rendered":"I Was a Grade-School Entrepreneur"},"content":{"rendered":"
My father was an entrepreneur.<\/a> He was always starting businesses. Most failed. Some succeeded in a wild fashion. (The inheritance he left the family is in the form of his most successful business, the source of my day job.) <\/p>\n It’s no surprise that as a child, I wanted to make money too. <\/p>\n I made my first business venture when I was in the second grade. I sold lemonade by the side of the road. It was miserable failure. I was trying to sell lemonade in March, on an infrequently-traveled stretch of country road, in rural Oregon. I didn’t sell any lemonade.<\/p>\n But in fourth grade, I started a little business that actually made money. Star Wars<\/i> was huge in 1978, and like all the other boys, I collected Star Wars<\/i> cards. Whatever change I could scrounge went to these cards. (We used to walk the sides of the roads collecting pop bottles. We’d cash in the deposits and immediately buy more Star Wars<\/i> cards.) Collecting was frustrating. Sometimes I would have six of one card, and none of another. This bugged me until I realized that I could turn the surplus to my advantage.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I took all of my doubles (and triples and quadruples, etc.) and sorted them into random piles of about twenty card each. I wrapped each stack in a piece of typing paper and wrote 10¢<\/b> on the package in black felt pen. I made as many packages as I could, took them to school, and sold them to the other boys. I took that money to the local variety store and converted it into new cards. It was brilliant!<\/p>\n I did the same thing with Hardy Boys<\/a> books. I loved the Hardy Boys — my aunts and uncles knew this, so I often got books as gifts. After I finished them, I’d take them to school and sell them for fifty cents. (They cost two dollars new.) <\/p>\n I was learning practical business lessons, and I was only ten years old<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"