The Dog has the honor of sitting on an advisory board of one of the local Universities; and with that comes the opportunity to participate in various faculty presentations about learning adventures. The most recent session asked us for input on the idea of undergraduate students determining ideas and strategies for new business development and expansion of existing small business. It was filled lots of suggestions about legalities, and accounting needs, and marketing plans, and such business things.
It also gave me a moment to reminisce
about my own youthful inexperience in starting a business; and why I continue
to worry that if we overload students with nothing but legal requirements and
accounting rules, we will deter a lot of them from trying to do something.
Too often I see the entrepreneurial spirit shot down by the numerous
challenges that come with any new venture.
Sometimes, I must say
that ignorance is a blissful place to start learning, and (as I think most
successful business leaders would agree) failure is the greatest
teacher.
I was 23 and looking for a journalism job in
Denver. This was before even considering college. The Dog became very frustrated and finally ran an
ad in the Colorado Press Association newsletter that said, “with 15 minutes
training I can do anything in journalism”.
About 2 weeks
later the phone rang with a couple of publishers asking me if I would be interested in
starting a weekly newspaper in Lafayette, Colorado. I won’t bore you with the details, but
I said yes. The deal was that they put up the money and I put up the
work.
I started by going up to Lafayette (9 miles east of
Boulder), and visiting the local grocery, the local banks, the local bars, the
local everything, and asking them about the previous local paper that went out
of business. I asked them what value they thought a local paper
gave Lafayette, and a lot of other questions, mainly just starting to get a
feel for the town. The weekly paper could only survive if their
advertising paid for it, and I was pretty up front with them on that. These days that exercise would be called doing a "market assessment". Back then it was just curiosity and common sense.
We rented a building, we found some old desks &
typewriters, we got a typesetter, we arranged for printing; and away we
went. I didn't have a lawyer or an accountant, and it was really learning as I went.
At the end of the first year, when I finally
did get an accountant to do the taxes, I still remember him asking, “WHAT DO
YOU MEAN YOU NEVER ACCRUED FOR TAXES?”
Needless to say, the cash
on hand took a big hit, and a payment plan was struck with the IRS.
But, this Dog learned a lot more by screwing that up, and we moved on quickly. We went on to increase circulation and
advertising sales & revenue. I also hired an associate to help
me.
The Lafayette Times was the only weekly newspaper in state history (at that
time) that made a profit at the end of the first year.
At the end of the
second year, I had paid back the other partners initial investment and we had
no debt.
At that point, the other partners wanted to pull more money out
and I wanted to put more in and continue to build it. The
partnership dissolved, and another life learning was waiting for me. What do you do when your 25 and you have achieved your life's goal for what you want to do?
I learned a whole lot of business acumen, and I learned integrity and commitment to a cause.
The value of learning forever instilled in my
DNA, and the search for what I want to do continues.
