Bill’s Life and Lessons Learned, Part II
There are some people, very exceptional people, who are so uniquely special that a courtesy joke is made; After they were born, the mold for making them was broken. In other words, there is no possibility that posterity will make more characters like Michelangelo, George Washington Carver, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, etc. In my case, they threw out the “mold”, but I tricked them and grew back!
Seriously speaking, the first lesson I learned when I was very young is that to sell successfully you must be relentless. You have to be absolutely awesome to be able to maintain your integrity and successfully sell something like “winter ice to the Eskimos.” However, as John Paul Ghetty, the oil trading billionaire observed, if you have a high-quality product that you know people repeatedly need and want, it will almost sell itself. ” Like the nursery stock we grow at Highland Hill Farm.
I have learned these lessons. There are basic concepts that are important to understand. From a very young age, I have always had “business”. My first business was making and selling pot holders when I was 5 years old. My parents had bought me a little gadget to make pot holders. Instead of doing a few for the sake of “arts and crafts”, developing my fingers and hands, I made hundreds and hundreds. I got really good at making really good pot holders, you could say. Whenever he met someone, he would try to sell them potholders for 25 cents each. As I made more and more money, I opened an account at the savings bank in Lambertville, always carrying lots of different colored pot holders with me when I walked into town to make my deposits. On the sidewalk and inside the bench, adults would inevitably say, “What a cute kid,” and then, “Why are you carrying all those cute potholders?” They sold themselves. The potholders sold themselves. Customers “sold” themselves.
I sold enough handles to buy 2 shares of General Electric and 2 shares of Atlas Corporation, following the advice of my great-uncle Bill. (See the story of my Uncle Bill, Part I of my life and my lessons learned). I got these shares when I was 7 years old. My initial small business expanded to include the hunt for Helgermites, or Hellgrammites, they are like Redworms, which I would sell along the highway (leading to the Delaware River, of course). I picked wild blackberries and sold them on the road too. I bought fishing lures and took them to sell along the east bank of the Delaware River, our side of the river. There were “hot spots” where tarpon fishermen would gather during the intense “fish races”. I also thought it was a good idea to bring some blackberries. The fisherman needed a sandwich. I did too.
I took advantage of my growing savings and bought 144 chickens. A “raw” of chickens came at a discounted unit price. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was “leveraging” my money and buying in bulk, “in bulk.” So here are two more valuable lessons for all of us. Buy as cheaply as you can. (Did you notice I didn’t buy a dozen chickens? That’s 1,728 chickens. The price per chicken would have been cheaper, but I could never have handled them all!) Plus, make your money work for you. Make your money work like a transistor works, use a little power to control a lot. My father, who happened to work in electronic engineering, had a wonderful friend who bought me a book on stock options. John was stuttering so terribly that he could barely speak, but I will always be grateful to him for teaching me about the biggest investment vehicle of all in the stock market: options. What a great way to make money work, invest a small amount of money to “own” rights to stocks that are worth much more money.
With my 144 chickens, I created an “egg route”, using the experience of my potholder business. He had “saturated” the market. How many potholders can people buy? John Paul Ghetty was right. It is better to sell something that people need repeatedly, like fuel and food. I sold eggs in the two towns closest to our little farm, Lambertville and Titusville, New Jersey.
I joined the 4H club and started raising bees for their honey. Once again, without realizing it, I was selling food, something that people needed over and over again, as John Paul Ghetty put it. While selling honey along with my eggs, I noticed that unlike some of my friends, I never received an allowance. On the other hand, he didn’t need one.
As you can see, my sales started early and they just never stopped. My parents’ family and friends helped me. My small businesses were very important to me and I learned the valuable lessons that I am sharing with you.
There was a great lesson in another book my father gave me, The ABCs of Beekeeping. You mentioned that if you wanted more bees, just put an ad, an “ad” in the newspaper. Just have the “ad” say “Bee Swarms Wanted”, with your phone number underneath. Well, stupid of me, I believed everything I read and that’s why I did exactly what it said in the book. A few days later a woman called me from Lambertville and told me she had a swarm of bees, could I go get it? I followed the guidelines my father taught me and from the book. I captured that first swarm and many, many more. Bees at the highest possible price discount, free, were available for him to use to make honey and earn money.
The preceding paragraphs contain a number of valuable lessons that have yet to be mentioned. First, it is important to find parents who support your efforts. I was lucky, but if you are not so blessed, seek out “mentors” as many other successful people have done. Second, it is important to read books. Give books away too. Don’t believe everything in them, believe most of what’s in them. Especially when you use at least two sources for your information. Reporters call this “corroboration” and “confirmation.” Third, the best way to find things or market them is through advertising.
With all these money-making ventures underway, I was spending a great deal of time outdoors. I developed a love for hunting and fishing. I loved the forest and being out in nature while “harvesting” the wild berries, collecting worms, taking care of bees, walking my egg and honey delivery route, and so on. As I got older, I became a teenager and then a teenager. Do you really ask? Without cheating? I say this because, like practically all other teenagers, I was interested in cars. I started collecting junk cars and trucks. When I started playing with one of them, my mother came out to talk to me. (There’s that lesson on the importance of finding caring parents. Wow, I was lucky with both of them!) My mother said, “Bill, you don’t want to be a farmer. They don’t make money. You have to study. Go to college and get a job. respectable. If he doesn’t, he will be a farmer working too long hours worrying about the weather and crop diseases and such. Or, he will be a garbage collector. I love you. ” Then he returned to the house. I guess you saw the junk cars and trucks that you had collected as garbage.
Listen to your mother. That’s a lesson you probably already knew before reading this. I chose a college in the woods not far from home in Pennsylvania. I graduated from Juniata College, near Huntingdon, in 1973 with a BA in Chemistry. My wife, Marjorie, also a Juniata graduate, is a teacher. We got married in 1977. We settled in Dublin, Pennsylvania. I worked for a small chemical plant. One weekend we had a garage sale. The first item to be sold was the bouquet of flowers I took from my wife’s planter. Here is another valuable lesson that I have learned. Be observant. This revelation told us that there is a market for plants here. If people buy them from their planter, the plants will “sell themselves.” I always had the desire to grow trees and plants and own a farm, although not being a farmer as my mother warned me, so we decided to “go for it”. Another valuable lesson: it’s good to have a plan …
We bought a small farm near Doylestown, in the prosperous and growing heart of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We started our “tree farm”, our nursery. The local newspaper, The Doylestown Intelligencer, became our “store.” Placing small “ads” in the newspaper below the classifieds was our method of advertising. A small, inexpensive 2-line ad like, “Pines Delivered. Planted and Mulched, $ 8. Guaranteed. Call 215-345-0946,” was tremendously inexpensive and phenomenally successful. We tested a lot of ads. We found that almost anything can be sold or bought using classified advertising. Would it have been better to place quarter-page or full-page sales ads? Would it have made sense to spend money that we didn’t have yet? I think the answer is no. “Buy as cheaply as you can,” I said earlier, is an important lesson.
Now, in addition to trees, we market anything at our consignment store in Milan, Pennsylvania.
A few years later, we learned another lesson. Friends, Walter and Paul, who make Christmas ball kits, invited us to dinner. They had years of marketing experience and they told us they had to test their market. His suggestion was to run ads for what he wants to do or sell and see the response, see if the market “likes” what he offers. Duh! This seems so obvious. They were right, though primitive and simple, isn’t this similar to what Marjorie and I had naturally been doing with our flowers and pine signs? Most people don’t test their markets before investing. We were lucky we did. So take this valuable lesson and “try”.
Marjorie and I are now starting to invest in agricultural properties and lease space on farms to help pay off mortgages so that we have positive cash flow. I decided that I would buy an option on a property (thanks again Daddy’s friend John for your lesson) and, if I could, look for tenants to rent the property. If the positive cash flow now existed, we would exercise the call option. In this way, we would only buy properties that were “cash cows.” We were testing to see if each of the properties would make money. (Thanks, Walter and Paul.) Also, we would have all the properties rented the day we take office so we don’t have vacancies. Okay, being in an area with a growing economy helped.
All this real estate “business”, all this investment that we are making is not “rocket science.” It is the planned application of simple ideas. Or, to put it another way, it is the implementation of a plan. As they would say at the Wharton School of Business, this is “Planning and Control.” Okay, enough repetitions from the Highland Hill Farm Redundancy Department. Just keep in mind that we do not invent any new products or provide better services. We spend our time, we “invest” our time “in advance”, in advance, be it a tree, a plant or a real estate that we are going to commercialize. We follow our plans and always invest our time before our money. I always tell people to start with the public library. It is a gift of many books for all of us. The price of all those books is also very low. They are free to borrow. Remember that you do not need to read, for example, “The International Plant Propagators’ Society Volume 54, 2004 Edition, 88888.000001 Pages” to be up to date. Read a wide variety of books. Even if they are simple, “practical books”, such as how to select how to plant, how to sell, types of books.
My last lesson is, always ask questions when you can’t find the answers for yourself. I have asked thousands of questions. Then listen to the responses. You can find more answers to just about anything on my website seedlingsrus.com.