| First Thing I Sold |
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Someone once asked me what the first thing I sold was, after-all that’s pretty much what it all comes down to – sales. I told him that my brother and sold grapes door to door. We'd pick them off our back fence, bag them up, load the wagon and start the rounds. During the grape "off-season" we'd scour the neighborhood, collect and redeem coke bottles. On the weekends my brother and I would go to the local golf course, thrash through the brush, find golf balls, clean them up and sell them back to the golfers, you may have seen the dramatization of this in the movie “Radio Flyer”. We ordered a "backyard fair" from the back of a comic book and held the fair in the front yard. A big hit, I don’t remember if we actually made any money but it didn’t matter, we had a great time. A highlight was when our neighbor, Clarence, lost his rooster. We lived in a suburb of Los Angeles, the last place you’d expect to see a rooster, (unless you lived there 50 years earlier). We were promised a big reward if we found it. My brother and I donned our expedition attire and set off to find the rooster. We figured they couldn’t fly so how far could it have gone. We struck gold, close to home; the rooster had slipped through a hole in the fence and made its way to a vacant field behind the house. We returned it for a whopping .25cent reward, two bits - a whole quarter. It was all in the experience. Sure we expected more, sure it would have been sweet to run around the corner and buy a couple of well deserved vanilla soft serve cones dipped in that magical chocolate “shell”. Magical because when the ice cream guy turned the cone upside down, the soft serve swirlled ice cream didn’t fall out. My brother and I had a mission (an idea), agreed to take on the task at hand (we had a core group – me and my brother), started looking close to home (develop and execute a plan, it couldn’t have gone far), look for and bring home the rooster. I guess the point here is that in some fashion or another this is exactly what is done today. Get a bright idea, build a core group of people around the idea, develop and execute a plan. I believe this is how all great ideas that are pursued get to the marketplace. I do the same thing today. I get an idea, build a core group of people around the idea, develop and execute a plan. |
