My interest for entrepreneurship goes way back – it probably all began with my father. My father is working in a bank, where medium sized companies will contact him asking whether they can lent money from the bank or not. Because of his job he had a lot of experience about how the financial part of a company should work or be arranged and was daily in contact with different companies. I remember the days where my father would come home from his job and tell us about the exciting ideas he had been presented for doing his working hours. His technical understanding about the companies and their products was not great, when i think about it now, but it didn’t matter at all for me and my brother at that time. We just thought i was cool to make your own money by selling something you had figured out yourself and we decided that one day we should do that.
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance
My parents have a house on the countryside with a big garden. A nearby crossroad splits the main road into to smaller roads, where one of them is running in front of our house and the other one leads to the sea. In that garden grows some very large cherry trees, there annually grows more cherries than we can eat no matter how much you are trying. It mean also that the birds had a annually feast every summer, but for us it was frustrating to see all the cherries getting eaten.
So one day my father had the idea, that we should pick a lot of cherries, weight and pack them in small plastic bags and make a small stand at the crossroad, so people who was going to the beach easily could grab a bag with them. They money we earned from the selling could my brother and i keep, as long as we made sure that the business was running.
And so it went on all summer. My father on a ladder picking cherries and fighting with the birds about how the berries actually belonged to, and my brother and I on our bikes driving in pendulum speed between our house and our stand, always curious about how much money we have earned since the last time we had been at the stand. We didn’t think about price regulering, bigger signs, competition or any thing, which belonged in the “adult’s way of making money”. We had fun running our own business. We earned about 100 euros that summer which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for two boy in the age between 10 and 12 it was a fortune, and more important than the actually profit; it was money we had earned ourselves.
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