Necessity Is the Mother of the Entrepreneur

I was 8 years old and I wanted some money of my very own. Since an allowance was not a parenting technique my depression era mother and father practiced, I was about to go into business for the first time.

I didn’t want to sell lemonade like all the other kids. The hours seemed long, you sat in the hot sun, and you were dependent on drive-by business. So I looked for a unique product offering.

My dad said I could rummage through the basement to find something to sell - I just had to get his permission before selling it. I found several bags of balloons left over from the county fair. At my dad’s booth for Modern Woodmen of America he gave away balloons to the little kids while he chatted up their parents. He laughed when I asked to sell them, but agreed.

Next – customers. Who would I sell balloons to? In Columbus, Nebraska my house was across the street from the YMCA where, during the summer, all kinds of swim classes and other diversions were offered. Customers! However, I only had access to them from 11:45 a.m., when the morning classes began to let out, until “open swim” began at 1:00 p.m.

The final challenge was to turn balloons into something worth paying for. A few weeks earlier I had been “introduced” to water balloons by two older boys in my neighborhood. Let’s just say my introduction was a very wet one and even though it was all in good fun, I didn’t like being on the short end of things.

That’s when it all came together - I would sell water balloons: 3 cents a piece and two for a nickel. I set up my shop, a cardboard table with three buckets of balloons filled and ready to fling. I targeted my market during prime time: when over one hundred kids poured from the Y into the late morning sun.

It worked! Customers crossed the street in droves, bought balloons and returned to the now not so friendly confines of the YMCA lawn. Water balloon fights of all kinds broke out. It was amazing to behold. Repeat business was strong!

Lessons learned that are still relevant today:

Being different and relevant is essential regardless of how little you might have in terms of resources. Customers don’t care how limited your budget is.

Scarcity unleashes creativity. Some business people blame a lack of resources on their failure. Not having money and resources forced me to be resourceful. Creativity is one’s greatest competitive advantage.

Why aren’t you applying your creativity to the needs of your customers?

Customer empathy makes for great products and meaningful sales. Feeling the pain (and the pleasure) of your customers results in marketplace magic. Saturn understood the pain of abusive car sales methods and the joy one could feel in buying a car. I understood the fun of water balloons and the panic of not having one in my hand when the others did.

Your customers should be charging you rent for living inside their heads!

Unfortunately, I went out of business the afternoon of my first day. It seems the manager of the YMCA, for some strange reason, didn’t want over one hundred kids armed with water balloons after his morning classes. Every business has a lifespan. Some are shorter than others. I was shut down

But that was OK with me. I had made over $4. At the then standard allowance of a quarter a week, I had made more than four months worth of allowance money in less than two hours! That still makes me smile.