We Are All Born Entrepreneurs

I’ve always been entrepreneurial in some respects (sometimes on my own, sometimes on behalf of others and sometimes in theory only). My first business as a kid was “Detective Chuck,” where I would find something that you had lost in your house for a nominal fee. It was followed by “Odd Job Chuck,” specializing in dirty deeds done cheap.

With those proceeds, I bought film and video equipment which (along with being a Co-Op student for a television commercial production company throughout high school) allowed me to have enough work under my belt to land me my first job at Young & Rubicam Advertising.

A few years later, I had a conversation with someone that I often think of (when reflecting on my becoming an entrepreneur and starting companies like Clout, my marketing firm in Ottawa and main focus these days). The story borne from the conversation reflects my sentiment that we are all born entrepreneurs: any one of us is capable of starting something by themselves; being an “entrepreneur” isn’t something that you are awarded, I stated to my friend, it isn’t a station in life, a title; being an entrepreneur is the risk you take every day in being confident enough to ask to be compensated for skills, talents or resources that you can exploit independently.

“After all,” I reasoned, “there are only two forces at work in the universe, creation and destruction. As such, we humans are natural problem solvers and it is part of our genetic coding to create, solve and build. There are none among us who have not daydreamed of the rewards and glory of a legacy of inventing, developing and marketing a good or service that the masses will need, desire and covet.”

I was chatting with someone in Toronto who was a newcomer to Canada. I went on to confess to her that I had a dream of someday starting my own business, that I felt that I had it in me and that I was often told that I should open my own shop (of some sort) someday. At the time, I was helping to launch a subsidiary of Rogers Communications and felt confident that I could launch and run my own company someday.

She said, “It’s a calling for everyone but it’s up to you to answer it if you really want to and when the timing is right.” I agreed with the sentiment and she went on to elaborate about her father, the owner of a large business back in her native country, a developing nation on a Southeast Asian island in the Pacific: he owned one of the largest construction companies in the country and it was rapidly expanding into new markets internationally.

“We were very poor when I was young,” she revealed, “and after a lot of hard work, now we are very rich.”

Of course, I had to ask her how he did it: how does one go from “nothing” to “something” in such a dramatic way.

She explained that for most of their childhood, they lived in squalor on a beach in a shack that her father had built of out of scraps of wood (making it a patchwork of pieces of different colours). Their roof was made of scrap metals, tin can lids, discarded pieces of sheet metal, rusted garbage can lids. This kind of shanty house was something I had seen in my childhood when I visited Haiti and was whisked through the city in a minivan from the airport to their ill-fated Club Med resort.

Her kitchen and dining room were a plot of grass outside where, every day, they would cook about a cup of rice and whatever food they could afford, find, barter for or forage. Their bathroom was a ditch, dug by hand and with scraps of wood, about a two minute’s walk away from their house.

And this was her childhood home, that was her family and how they lived their life until recently. It was all that my friend knew; but, she knew that they had it in them to not settle, that they could aim to reach their modest dreams of getting off of the beach, out of the slums, of achieving their potential to be the best that they could.

Though she knew it was “poverty,” and she knew that hunger was painful and that work was hard, she imagined sleeping on mattresses, hot water from a faucet, having privacy from her siblings and a shelf full of books to explore. She knew that her family was happy and proud and that dignity was priceless: that, despite their hardships, her parents woke every morning and faced the day. Some nights, she explained to me, they went to bed hungry but they would never go to bed defeated. The next day, they would eat scraps of rice and grasses, watery broths or nothing at all, but they would never lose their determination to rise above it all.

By any means lawful, her parents would see that they had something to eat each day so that they could face the days after. They would not wait for a solution, they would create one.

Her father used to walk once or twice per week to a local dump to collect scraps for their home, pots and pans, discarded clothes they could mend and the like.

While there, he noticed an increase in traffic from dump trucks that seemed to coming from worksites: they offered he and the others rummaging there old cinder blocks and rebar to build with, bent nails for fish hooks and the like, old buckets for water and the like. He brought some of the items back to his house after a long journey, carrying them by hand, to be greeted by a family wondering about their origins before being at the garbage dump.

Her father finally realized that the new construction traffic must have been coming from municipal work-sites; he hypothesized that, perhaps, there was a boom on the horizon in development in the neighbouring cities. He imagined new buildings being erected alongside freshly-laid sidewalks, new streets being paved that lead to family homes that he would love to be able to afford.

And then, one day at the trash dump, when he and a group of others were clamouring over a load being left behind by construction trucks that morning, something caught his eye: a handle from a rake, perhaps a spade, sticking upright out of the garbage as if it were Excalbur itself.

He quickly grabbed it and pulled it out, revealing that it was, in fact, a shovel. And, although it was rusted and worn, it was still very usable. Unable to afford a proper one himself, and having had to rely on using makeshift ones back at his home to dig pits and trenches, he ecstatically took it home and began putting it to good use.

However, when he awoke in the morning, he realized that he had used it as much as he had needed to for the time-being and began thinking of other uses for it: how else could this come in handy? ‘Could I use the handle as a support beam in the house somehow? Would I ever need to use it as firewood? Would it work as an axe? If I cleaned the head of it a bit, could we use it as a makeshift frying pan without getting sick? Should I use it to stoke fires somehow?’

Yet, the shovel was in too good a condition for him to break it apart to use it in this fashion and thereby destroy it’s intended purpose. He began wondering if any of his neighbours could make use of it or, better yet, if it would be more profitable for him to be hired by them somehow to use it for them. ‘What’s worth more? This shovel or my labour with it?’

With nothing to lose, he walked down the beach to another family as they sat on the beach. He asked the father if he was in need of a new fire pit or latrine. The neighbour said that he was.

At that point, my friend’s father realized that the mother of the family was cleaning two fresh chickens. The fathers agreed that a new fire pit and a new latrine would be dug in exchange for a chicken.

My friend’s family ate well that night and celebrated their good turn of fortune. Inspired by this barter, my friend’s father awoke the next day and rapidly and enthusiastically began an hour-long trek by foot to the nearest village to find more work with his new shovel (or, failing that, someone to buy it).

On his way to the village, he passed a farmer in his field who was measuring a small plot of land using twine. He asked the farmer what he was doing and was told that he was planning on digging irrigation trenches for his field.

My friend’s father asked the farmer if he was doing the work himself or if he had hired anyone yet to dig the trenches. The farmer said that he had a few men in mind from the nearby village but was open to suggestions.

“You should hire my company,” said my friend’s father half-jokingly as he held up the shovel like a trophy. “We’re a small, hard-working team. We have all of our own tools and, because we are new, are very reasonably priced and are the best trench-diggers that we know of. We just finished a job, our client was very happy, and we would love to get to work for you here this afternoon.”

“The farmer was impressed and hired him on the spot!” my friend exclaimed.

And, after a few days, when the trenches had all been dug and her father’s hands were shredded apart from his efforts, the farmer was happy and paid him handsomely. The payment allowed the father to buy food for the family for a week and, with the remainder, a used spade and pick axe in the village.

He took the tools to another nearby village and found a large estate being built on the outskirts where, once again, he was hired to help dig garden beds around the property. With those earnings, he provided for his family, bought hardware to improve his own home and supplies for his newfound career.

In the village, he found two others looking for work. He handed them his tools and lead them to a construction site of a new apartment building. There, his new company was able to land work excavating land for a parking lot, digging trenches for water pipelines and levelling soil in preparation for a lawn.

With those proceeds, he bought more shovels, more tools, and had bus fare to get his crew to the nearby cities. With the work he landed there, he was able to buy more shovels that could be used by more men, work clothes for himself and a powered troweling machine to make their work more efficient. With them, they would dig anything and everywhere they could find the need.

Soon after, he bought a jack hammer, wheelbarrows and even more shovels. In turn, he hired more men as he took on more and more work, bigger and bigger jobs.

After a few weeks, he had acquired so many clients, tools, staff, he found himself able to rent an apartment for his family in the village nearby: the children had their own bedrooms, they had a kitchen with appliances, a radio, a fan to keep them cool and a full pantry to keep them fed.

“After a year, his efforts resulted in him buying a pickup truck, then a back-hoe, then a small bulldozer,” she said to me, her eyes lighting up with pride.

And, after five years, his hard work resulted in him landing government contracts and the means for them to buy a home.

His staff of a few became a staff of twenty, and then fifty. His roster of clients grew from nearby cities and villages to the entire country and, from there, to neighbouring countries.

After ten years, his business had outgrown his competitors and his family had outgrown their new home: they now owned a large house overlooking the ocean with large gardens, garages for their cars, a backyard with a swimming pool for entertaining. Although they were just a short walk from their old shed on the beach, they were quickly living a lifetime away from it and its tribulations. They could afford good food, doctors and schools for the kids.

After fifteen years, in 2001, I met his daughter in Canada: a newcomer looking for new contracts for her family business to expand into North American markets day by day, step by step, making their fortunes better by any means available.

Her story of her father was the story of countless entrepreneurs who made something big from something seemingly small.

“What’s stopping you from becoming as successful as you want to be?” she asked me after finishing her tale. “Do you need to find the right tools for getting to work,” she asked before quipping “Are you incapable of moving the earth?”

 

Tags: entrepreneurship, startup