Just snow stories

One good thing about sitting in a warm beach chair is that I can think about times when I wasn’t sitting in a warm beach chair.

So I’ll entertain a little yarn. This yarn conveys that much of what I’ve learned about business came from when I started shoveling snow in junior high school.

I don’t have a grand and unified theory to this stuff. I don’t have any profound insights.

Heck, I don’t even have an elegant narrative.

But sometimes a few random notes are worth contemplating.

One winter morning, when I was a kid, I looked out of our apartment window. The neighborhood was blanketed under a fat white layer of fresh snow. To the grownups this was an inconvenience. To me, however, it was an invitation to scare up some action.

I was in middle school and just old enough to slip away from the home nest without being interrogated about my intentions.

And I intended to get in the snow removal business.

I walked downtown to a hardware store to buy a snow shovel. The other customers were hurrying through their business, but as a kid with no responsibilities I had the leisure of enjoying my decision. Hey, if you’re going to buy something, you might as well like what you’re buying.

And what I was buying was going to cost a large portion of my “life savings” at the time, so I wanted to choose my tool wisely.

Eventually, however, a clerk started snipping at me for constantly picking up the shovels and handling them. So I snipped right back at the guy.

Which I’ll rack up as an early lesson in business: It’s awfully easy to get derailed by the antipathy of minions, so you just have to stand your ground.

After trudging back to my neighborhood, I canvassed the area, offering to shovel the snow from sidewalks and driveways.

I had no success the first time out.

The next snowfall came a week later.

No luck then, either.

In cold climates, people resent having to open their doors to the inrush of cold air. Being an unsolicited pitch man is not a role for the thin-skinned.

Anyway, when the third time came around, I was still batting zero.

So at some point during that gray day I decided to just start shoveling someone’s sidewalk. I didn’t have some grand strategy behind this, I was just sick of being bored.

Snow shovels make noise when they reach pavement and grate against it. So on an otherwise quiet day people can hear the action. After a little bit of my shoveling, two neighbors actually beckoned me to serve them.

Talk about a weird inversion of marketing assumptions: When I visited the customers and made my pitch, they couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. However, once I was doing what they didn’t want me to do, and now that I wasn’t pitching anything to anybody, they beat a path to my shovel.

Go figure.

Anyway, by the end of that season I had a roster of regular customers. When the next winter rolled around, I pretty much just shored up my action from the first one.

By the time the third winter came along, I owned a large snow blower, which is sort of like a lawn mover for snow. This thing drank a lot of gasoline and made a lot of noise. Which is to say, it was highly cool.

There was no fourth winter for me; my family moved to warm California. This was the end of my action in small-time snow removal.

But there is no shame in small-time. As I was pondering those small-time days I decided to convert my memories into inflation-adjusted terms.

The result? Well, in terms of today’s dollars, I was making about $30 an hour. This became my rent-and-pizza money in college.

But college is getting far beyond my context here, so I’ll just hunker down in my beach chair and enjoy the warm sunshine.