Читать книгу Start Small Finish Big - Fred DeLuca - Страница 8

These microentrepreneurs are certain of one thing: Starting small is better than never starting at all! Regardless of money, circumstances, and experience, these microentrepreneurs will show you how to get started.

My story sounds a little improbable, doesn’t it? After all, who could go to a barbecue one day without any intention of starting a business and wind up with a plan, a partner, and the seed money to get started? And what seventeen-year-old ever started a business before, anyway? And who can start a business with only $1,000?

Actually, I think most people would be quite surprised by the number of businesspeople who start on a shoestring and their array of improbable beginnings. You don’t even have to scour the country to find them. For a real eye-opener, survey ten local businesspeople in your own community to learn how they got started and how much money they started with. My bet is that at least two of them, and perhaps as many as five of them, will tell you an interesting story of the tiny business they started long ago with less than $10,000.

Most people think that starting a business is a complex proposition. Dynamic entrepreneurs with big plans and lots of resources are the type who start businesses. They have special training, brilliant ideas, unique strategies, and a cadre of sophisticated advisers at their beck and call. Most people don’t think that regular folks with ordinary ideas and limited resources can make much happen. Boy, would they be surprised at the way the real world works.

This book is all about regular people who start small businesses in ordinary ways. As you read the stories in this book you’ll see that my story is similar to the way many others have started. What can you do with a thousand dollars? people often ask when I tell them that’s all the money I had to start Subway. Of the many entrepreneurs I meet every year, more than a third of them started their first businesses with less than $10,000 and some of them with far less than $1,000. But the amount of money doesn’t really matter, as you’ll see in the stories that follow. In this chapter I’ll quickly introduce you to several of these “regular folks,” then in the next fourteen chapters I’ll introduce you to more of these same kinds of people in greater depth. More than the money, getting started is what it’s all about, and all of these microentrepreneurs will tell you that it’s better to start small than never start at all.

Jeremy Weiner, for example, never hesitated to start small. He was suffering from boredom in the summer of 1995 between his sophomore and junior years in college. He attended Babson College in Wellesley, near Boston, well known for its entrepreneurial program, but he spent the summer at home in California. He was supposed to be working at two different brokerage firms in Beverly Hills, preparing to become an investment banker after graduation. By midsummer, however, he discovered that he hated the business. With several weeks remaining before returning to Babson, Jeremy quit both of his jobs. For a couple of days he hung out on a friend’s boat, but then the reality of his empty bank account struck him, and he decided he better earn some money before he returned east to school.

Jeremy learned to make money when he was just ten years old. In the fourth grade, with an Apple 2GS computer that his parents purchased for him, and a software program called Print shop, he started his first business. “I was just a kid, but I figured out how to make banners,” he says. “When my mom took me to the mall I sold banners to the retailers. Five bucks a page! It was great revenue. I’d be lying to you if I told you I knew what I was doing.”

As a high school student he and a friend worked in concessions at a movie theater frequented by Hollywood stars. “We saw an opportunity to sell more popcorn and drinks if we had a cart to push through the theaters,” says Jeremy. “We noticed that the stars weren’t standing in line to buy stuff, and a lot of other people didn’t want to stand in long lines, either. They’d just go into the theater and sit down. So my friend and I convinced the manager to let us start a cart. We sold a lot more popcorn that way.”

They also added handsomely to their earnings!

“The tip money was really good,” says Jeremy.

However, the theater’s managers soon put an end to the cart because it created more work for them. “Even though we were selling more food and drinks, the managers didn’t like it because the cart was another register that they had to close out at the end of the night. We didn’t have any say in the matter, they just told us to stop. I should have known then that I’d never want to work in a corporation. Bureaucracy isn’t something that I could ever get used to.”

In his sophomore year at Babson College, Jeremy started a student directory, for which he sold advertising. If there was one thing he could do well, it was sell. That’s why he pounced on an opportunity to sell ad space in those remaining weeks of his summer boredom. One day he visited his former high school, just to say hello, and to rib the principal about a B that he thought should have been an A. While he was there, he got an idea. He noticed that the school needed covers for the students’ textbooks. He asked the principal if he could provide the covers, and the principal agreed. He contacted three other area schools and asked if they needed covers. They all said yes. Then he contacted local businesses who wanted to reach the school market. Within a couple of weeks—with no investment other than gas money and phone calls—he raised $10,000 in ad revenue! Printing the book covers for all four schools cost $1,000. “With $9,000 net,” says Jeremy, “I still had a week to spend on the beach before I had to go to school.”

At first, Jeremy had no plans of repeating the book cover gig, at least not by himself. He did it to make money. He made the money. End of story. However, the next summer he explained to his brother, Brian, and a friend, Michael Gleeson, how they could continue operating the business. He taught them how to contact schools and sell advertising. While the guys got busy, Jeremy accepted a summer job working directly with the president of a toy company in Boston. He thought it was an ideal opportunity to learn about running a business. By midsummer, Brian and Mike had signed up fifty schools, but they had spent little time generating sales. So Jeremy took a leave of absence from the toy company to sell the advertising.

With only a few weeks remaining in the summer, Jeremy worked the phones and through sheer persistence sold a major deal to JanSport, the leading manufacturer of backpacks. The company bought the front cover for $24,999. Two additional spots on the back cover netted another $13,800, and included a recruitment ad purchased by the Los Angeles Police Department. With gross sales of $38,800, Jeremy anticipated earning a modest profit, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead of purchasing covers for five schools he purchased for fifty schools. The printing bill jumped to $30,000. With delivery costs, phone bills, and miscellaneous expenses, the summer enterprise lost $2,700!

Undaunted by the loss, Jeremy and Gleeson teamed up in a senior field studies course about entrepreneurship and wrote a business plan for what they now called Cover-It. Their primary motivation for writing the plan was not only to operate the business, but to compete for the prestigious John H. Muller, Jr., Business Plan Award, which included a $5,000 prize, and Babson’s Student Initiative Award, worth $1,000. In spite of tough competition, including more than 100 submissions for the Muller award, the entrepreneurial pair won both awards in April 1997. They split the $6,000, which more than covered their losses from the previous summer.

Following graduation from Babson amidst a flurry of media articles about his successes, Jeremy was offered numerous jobs. However, he turned them all down. He decided to pursue his future with Cover-It. At first, his partner was going to join him, but at the last minute he decided not to. He turned over his interest in Cover-It to Jeremy, who set up shop in a printer’s office in Boston and went to work. JanSport renewed its contract for $70,000, and the L.A. Police Department renewed, too. Jeremy expanded the number of schools in his distribution network from a mere 50 to 16,000, reaching 12 million students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. How he accomplished those numbers is a trade secret. “One of the toughest things about this business,” he explains, “is to sign up schools.” Once the selling season ended, and Jeremy distributed the book covers, he ended up with approximately $30,000.

By the next year, he expanded Cover-It’s distribution to 26 million students (distribution would eventually climb to 30 million). Instead of printing one cover for all the schools in his network, he printed five, creating five front covers to sell instead of one. By 1999, with ten employees, three offices—Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and distribution in all fifty states, Cover-It exceeded $1 million in sales. Jeremy projected that his year 2000 gross revenue would exceed $2 million.

At age twenty-four, Jeremy says he’s still figuring out how to run his business. “Every month,” he says, “there are thousands of challenges.” But given the choice of working for someone else, or owning your own business, Jeremy says there is no choice—especially when you can start small and finish big.

Paulette Ensign of San Diego, California, is another microentrepreneur who started a business with almost no money invested. She taught string instruments in public elementary schools in New York and Connecticut. In 1981, with a master’s degree, she was earning just shy of $18,000 annually. After ten years, she decided she had had enough. Nothing was working in her life. She was unsatisfied with the teaching, she wasn’t earning enough money, and her marriage wasn’t working. She needed a change.

While she was an excellent teacher, and a better-than-average violinist, neither of those qualities interested her anymore. Oddly enough, perhaps as a response to the turmoil in her life, she felt like cleaning up. She was good at organization. Drawers, cabinets, checkbooks, desks, schedules—all of them yielded to her expertise. She never spent time looking for things because in her world everything had its place, and she never permitted anything to be out of place. “My personality,” she says, “is one of being naturally organized. If a pile gets to be more than two inches, I’m uncomfortable and I need to have those things find their homes.” So when a neighbor lady, who was well aware of Paulette’s organizational skills, and equally aware that she was looking for work, offered to pay her to organize her house, it was a perfect match.

“We each had something the other one needed,” says Paulette, who hasn’t surrendered her throaty New York accent to San Diego, where she’s resided for several years. “She needed help organizing a lifetime of accumulation in her home, and I needed money.” After several days of digging through the contents of her neighbor’s home in April 1983, Paulette found a business.

“I was enjoying the gratification of working with this woman, creating order out of chaos. The gratification fed a need of mine, and it was good. I got the idea that I could make a business out of this. There was an exchange of money for service, and it was a service that others needed. So even though it was a financial stretch for me, I threw a $25 classified ad in the Scarsdale Inquirer and another in the Westchester Women’s News. My ads said something to the effect of create order out of chaos. It was down-and-dirty simplistic, and it didn’t take long for my phone to ring.”

However, it also wasn’t long before the phone was about to be cut off. “My husband and I had hit rock bottom in our relationship,” Paulette explains. “We didn’t have enough money to pay our bills. Everyone was at our door to collect. We had a backlog of six to seven months of bills. We had no money in reserve. Friends were sending us food. My family was incredulous. How could you allow yourself to get into such a mess?” Within a year the couple separated and divorced.

As requests for Paulette’s organizational skills started to build, she increased her hourly fee from $10 to $25, and that relieved some of her financial strain. “I was bright enough to target my advertising to affluent communities,” she explains. “Some folks hired me to come into their homes once or twice a month to write checks for them. Others hired me for a day or two a week. I was soon making about $1,800 a month, and the money was like manna from heaven.”

For the next eight years, Paulette organized homes and offices. In 1986 she incorporated her business under the name Organizing Solutions. Eventually she purposely priced herself out of the residential market and focused on the commercial market where she could earn up to $125 an hour. Later, a major New York City–based bank hired her to conduct a workshop entitled Managing Multiple Priorities. At the height of her business, she was earning $100,000 a year!

But by the early 1990s, the economy shifted and suddenly the workshop business went soft and managing priorities was no longer such a big issue. Companies decided against sending their employees to workshops that cost money. “I was down and out,” says Paulette, “and my bills were beginning to backlog again. The cash wasn’t flowing and I still hadn’t learned how to save or invest money. I had no cushion for myself—saving money is a missing cell in my brain! I needed to do something fast.”

That’s when she remembered a booklet that she had received several months earlier. She had placed it in a desk drawer thinking she might return to it someday. It was a book of tips about how to make business presentations, and when Paulette read it she thought, “I could do better.” Now was the time to do it.

She spent several days writing 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business, a booklet that, once printed and bound, could be mailed in a business-size envelope. All of the information in the booklet was based on material that Paulette taught in her seminars and used in her consulting sessions. Once she finished typing the manuscript, she located a printer, agreed to pay him $300 over a period of ninety days, and he produced a supply of the booklets. Meanwhile, with no advertising money to promote her product, Paulette sent excerpts from her booklet to magazines, newsletters, and newspapers, and invited the editors to publish her material in exchange for mentioning how readers could purchase a copy of the booklet. During the next six months, she sold 15,000 booklets at $3 each! Later she increased the per booklet price to $5. Five thousand sales came from one source, a newsletter called Bottom Line Personal. “They ran only nine lines of text about my booklet,” says Paulette, “and when I went to the post-office I found a pink slip that said: See Clerk. They could not fit all of the envelopes in my mailbox!”

Since producing her booklet in 1991, Paulette has sold more than half a million copies in three languages without spending a penny on advertising. She also has licensed several companies to reproduce her booklet for their own promotions. Lillian Vernon offered the booklet free to customers who purchased from the company’s catalogue. After Paulette established a Web site and began communicating in cyberspace, she sold 105,000 copies of her booklet to a firm in Milan, Italy. “To this day we’ve never spoken,” she explains. “We’ve done all of our business by electronic mail.”

In addition to booklet sales, Paulette now generates revenue by teaching others how to write, produce, market, and sell booklets. She has created a videotape and workbook package that she sells via her Web page, www.tipsbooklets.com. She teaches many seminars by telephone, consults privately with clients, and also teaches public seminars.

“Along the way,” Paulette says, “I’m learning how to make money. When I started my business, I had to dig out of a hole. I was making decent bucks, but I had to work my way up to zero. I don’t think that’s an unusual situation. But as I started to own my intelligence, I got smarter. For example, I said why sell booklets for $3 when it’s a lot easier to pull a $5 out of a wallet? When I realized that I’m an intelligent person and I was just missing some information, and all I had to do was get it, business became easier. In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of enthusiasm and the ability to talk endlessly.”

And with those qualities, who needs much money to start a business?

Michael and Jamie Ford of Los Lunas, New Mexico, near Albuquerque, have yet another story to tell about the virtues of starting small. They were once a middle-class family living in Oklahoma with their three young children. They decided to move to New Mexico in 1991 to be near Michael’s grandmother, who was ill. Little did they know that the move would nearly destroy them financially. In a short period of time, they went from middle-class to living off public assistance. It wasn’t until they managed to borrow some money to start a business that they got back on their feet again.