Entrepreneurship and Schools

Like many kids then and today, I came into 7th grade an involuntary veteran salesperson, having been shoved out on a door-to-door sales route for years selling expensive candy bars to my parent's friends, extended family and neighbors.

My school was actually fairly practical in its curriculum, including home economics and industrial arts classes that actually taught real skills. They even paid lip service to entrepreneurship in the form of organizing student fundraisers at events like basketball games and during homecoming week.

Personally, at that point in my life, I'd actually seen very little of normal "jobs" modeled in my parents and extended family. Nearly every adult I knew was self-employed in some way: farmers, taxidermist, auto body shop, carpenter, etc.

So, when I decided I wanted some extra money at the age of 13, my first instinct was to look around for an opportunity to leverage the laws of supply and demand to make a profit.

Whether I took the school bus or rode my bike, I was used to being to school quite a while before the first bell rang for class. What I saw was a bunch of kids milling around before school, and many of them complaining about not having had breakfast.

So, one morning, I rode my bike past the school to the New London bakery and bought a bag of a dozen assorted donuts at $0.35 or $0.50 a piece or so, packed them in my school bag and rode up the hill to the school. I unloaded and sold those donuts for $1 a piece, selling out in about 10 minutes.

Clearly I was onto something.

The next day, I repeated the procedure, doubling the number of donuts and pushing the boundaries of what I could easily carry on my bike. I sold out in 15 minutes.

Having outstripped my delivery capacity, I offered my dad a cut if he'd drive me to the bakery the next morning, thus boosting my transport capacity from Schwinn to Ford Bronco. I don't remember how many I bought that day, but I do remember needing to make several trips to my locker with boxes of donuts.

I was half-way through selling through the donut supply in my locker when the principal came by and shut me down. I wasn't really given much of a reason why, just that I couldn't continue selling tasty pastries out of my locker.

Because of the few days I had sold, I had a bit of capital that I rolled into my next venture: being a loan shark. In those days, school lunch cost exactly $1 (or $0.40 if you were on gov't subsidized lunch like I was). People often forgot their money for lunch. So, I offered loans at what the adult me sees as abusive interest. The terms were no interest if you paid back the next day. Otherwise, it was $1/day in interest.

While that lasted longer, I was still admonished several times and told to stop.

I believe if you had asked every teacher and administrator in that school if they thought students should be taught how to run a business, you'd have gotten a unanimous "yes". Yet, when at least one student actually started a business on school grounds (with no illegal activity. I never physically threatened or hurt anyone even as a loan shark), they shut it down with no hesitation.

I suspect the lesson I learned wasn't the one they intended to teach.