We used what little that was to buy inventory, and furnished the store ourselves the final touch was a used piss-stained mattress from the Salvation Army store that we put in the back of the store to sleep on. Hello every credit card we could get our hands on. We had enough to start our businessīecause we were young guys with no credit rating, the only place that would give us a storefront required a year’s rent in advance and our rent was $1,000 a month.īye bye $12,000 dollars. It was hard, and just flat out sucked.īut we made $12,000. With the humid & hot Missouri summer heat reflecting off the concrete, we felt like we were getting slow roasted.
Well, the problem was, that before you painted the stripes, you had to take out the concrete dividers, then put them back when it had dried.
That first lesson? “You can’t start a store without money”, and so Chris and I took multiple summer jobs, including painting the stripes on parking lots. Why? Because I never would have learned the invaluable lessons life taught me if I hadn’t started from 0. He wanted me to learn the right way - the tough way - and if he had given me that money, you wouldn’t be reading this now. My dad had been financially successful with his own business, but he wasn’t about to cut me a check. We were both athletes and liked lifting weights, so it seemed like a good fit for our first business. My friend Chris and I had seen a guy making good money by opening a supplement store, and we figured that would be our path to riches. That you can just learn a lesson once, and the rest will take care of itself. That’s what we’d all like to think, isn’t it? That it’s that easy. I realized that, as much as I loved individual victories, that nothing beats winning as a team.Īnd from there it was all great, and I became an overnight success. That drive first manifested itself with sports.
I knew it, but I just didn’t know how to change my circumstances. Even as a kid, I knew that there had to be more to life than boring classrooms, more than a 9-5 job that I hated. Honestly, I’d rather just fast forward to the final part. Leave education at the first legal opportunity. I was told that I wasn’t "the cream of the crop", and I believed it! Hell, I didn’t even feel like part of the crop! Apparently, colleges like that weren’t for kids like me. When I told them that I wanted to play football at Notre Dame, the teacher pretty much laughed in my face. The other kids made fun of me for being dumb. But the rest of the time? I was a solid D student. Occasionally a class would pop up that flipped my switch, and I’d ace it. I grew up on a dirt road in Missouri, and I had big dreams about cars and money - what kid doesn’t? The problem was, my appetite for junk food was a lot stronger than my appetite for success. We’ll get to why that is, but first, I want you to know what they called me as a kid: