My first little business venture I
was seven years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one
of those long extension cords. And I was calling all the dry cleaners in
Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers.
And my mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get
the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" And I said, "Let's go
and look in the basement." And we went down to the basement. And I opened
up this cupboard. And there was about a thousand coat hangers that I'd
collected. Because, when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I
was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in
the basement to sell. Because I saw her a few weeks before that saying “you could get paid.” They used to pay you
two cents per coat hanger. So I was just like, well there's all kinds of coat
hangers. And so I'll just go get them. And I knew she wouldn't want me to go
get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually
negotiate with people. This one person offered me three cents and I got him up
to three and a half. I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually
get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied
up. At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for a
thousand coat hangers ( raising children).
I sold license plate protectors
door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these
things at wholesale. And at nine years old, I walked around in the city of
Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. And I remember
this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these
clients. I sold newspapers. And he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever. But I
was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. And he's
like, "Well, we don't need one." And I said, "But you have two
cars and they don't have license plate protectors." And he said, "I
know." And I said, "This car here's got one license plate that's all
crumpled up." And he said, "Yes, that's my wife's car." And I
said, "Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see
if it lasts longer." So I knew there were two cars with two license plates
on each. If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that
at a young age.
I did comic book arbitrage. When I
was about years old, I sold comic books
out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. And I would go biking up to the end of the
beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids. And then I would go back to
the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. But it was obvious
to me, right? Buy low, sell high. You've got this demand over here that has
money. Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich
people do. Go get some. So that's obvious, right. It's like a recession. So,
there's a recession. There's still
trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy. Go get some of that ( raising children).
This is Adam Norman, a 30-year-old father and a journalist. I consider being a father as my full-time duty, which comes before my actual job of journalism. As a father, there will always be new challenges for me to face everyday while raising my kids. This is where the idea of this website came from. I wanted to give out my experience, along with the experience of others, to all parents out there who need an advice with raising their kids.
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