The Early Business Life of a Budding Entrepreneur-Part 1.

Article Title:
Author Name: George R. Marshall

The Early Business Life of a Budding Entrepreneur-Part 1.

Category (key words): Entrepreneurship, Business, Humour

Web Sites: http://www.drgeorgem.us

and http://www.freewebs.com/moneybox

Publishing Guidelines: This piece may be freely published, electronically or in print as long as the information provided on the author, etc. is kept intact with the article.


Introduction: Here is a humorous tale of my early attempts at being an entrepreneur. After many false starts throughout the decades I finally succeeded in founding a successful Internet-based survey company - www.clearpicture.com . I retired and am in the process of establishing four Internet-based initiatives aimed at providing zero or very low risk income opportunities, and access to pre-launch opportunities that promise to go very big. Contact me at gmarsh70@ns.sympatico.ca for more information on these income opportunities.
Dr. George-- Your Guide to Wealth and Power.



The Early Business Life of a Budding Entrepreneur-Part 1.

By George R. Marshall ©--Copyright 2000

Back in the late fifties I attended Brooklyn College evening classes, four nights a week to obtain my Bachelor’s degree in psychology. During the day, I sold ladies shoes at B. Altman’s a Fifth Avenue high-class department store—now defunct. One of the salesmen, James, was a chap about 40 years old from London, England who spoke in a refined British voice and appeared to me as a man down on his luck—working at a job beneath his station so to speak. I was 26 years old at the time.

About five months before Xmas, James and I started brainstorming how we could make some money. We came up with the idea of personalized Xmas records with the names of children recorded along with the gifts they were going to receive. This type of record is commonplace now but was unknown back then.

I located a second hand recording device that cut 45 records, one at a time. I found a supply of blank 45’s and we were in business. We cribbed some holiday music from Bing Crosby as background: "Here comes Santa Claus." James with his resonant English voice was Santa Claus and first he recorded the standard message on our crude wire recorder with blanks left for the child’s name and list of gifts to be inserted one record at a time via microphone.

So we advertised in the local newspaper—warning people to send in their child’s name and list of gifts early. Soon we had a few hundred orders accompanied by the $2.50/record we were charging.

Dear reader, do you envision obstacles and problems cropping up in our enterprise’s future? Well you envision correctly. Timing the insert of the child’s name and list of gifts became a bit tricky. Sometimes the list would be quite lengthy and James had to talk very quickly.

My job was to fan James, keep a Scotch and Soda handy for him, and act as recording engineer switching from input via the wire recorder to the microphone and then back again to the wire recorder as accurately and smoothly as possible. Our quality control was not to the highest standard—we felt we had succeeded if you could hear and understand the child’s name.

After a recording session of a few hours we would both man the packing and shipping department. It was my job to get the packages to the post office the next day.

After several evenings of production, James looked worn out and stated that if he heard ‘Here comes Santa Claus’ one more time he would commit some crime against humanity, killing the next street Santa Claus he met or something equally horrendous. I fanned him, gave him a drink and reminded him how much money we had made.

Anyway by the first week of December we closed the operation and divided the spoils. I felt so bad for poor James, who obviously needed the money more than I did, that I gave him all the money and I kept the recorder and record cutter. For me, the hilarity of listening to James as he tried to fit two or three children’s names and a list of 40 gifts into a space suitable for one name and five gifts, was an added bonus. We parted friends but avoided each other over the next few months. James left the shoe department in March to return with his wife to England.

This enterprise whetted my appetite for the life of the entrepreneur. A few years later I started a ski tour operation with Buzz Eichel, a friend of mine in law school. By that time I had been admitted to graduate studies in psychology at New York University. But the ski trip caper is another story reported in Part 2.



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