White Walls, Lots of Paint

In creating this blog, I was asked to make a tagline that described it.  I know that writing to a particular audience is good.  I usually can ramble on about most subject.  In this blog I am going to mostly talk about marketing and business.

As a start I would like to tell you about one of my earliest business ventures.  I and my brother were around eleven years old.  We, like most kids in the neighborhood, loved to ride bicycles.  We also had learned by then that making money was something we wanted to do.  So, we decided to open a bicycle repair shop.  The shop consisted of a bicycle pump, a couple of screw drivers, two wrenches, some lighter fluid, and matches.  Our first customer was Allen.  We knew Allen from around the neighborhood, but he was not a close friend.  It was a good thing he wasn’t.  If he had been, he wouldn’t have been after the day we worked on his bike.

He had gotten a new set of pedals and wanted us to change them for him.  Simple enough.  We had changed bicycle pedals before so we knew it would be easy.  We tried for thirty minutes to get those pedals off with no progress.  They just wouldn’t come off.  That’s when one of us, I ‘m not sure which one, came up with the bright idea to burn them off.  That’s right, we doused the pedals with lighter fluid and set them on fire.  It seemed logical.  The pedals were, after all, plastic.

Well, it didn’t work.  And to make matters worse, Allen showed up while his bike was engulfed in flames.  Now to our defense, it looked much much worse than it really was, but all he saw was his bike melting in an incinerator of flames.  When the fire finally went out the bike could still be ridden, but the pedals were a chard mass that not even the smallest of feet could balance on.

That day we start and ended our bike business.  We learned a very valuable thing, don’t burn your customers.  You might not be able to fix it later.