My Journey in Small Business

It’s summer and my wife and I are driving down to her sister’s house near Long Beach Island. We’re taking back roads and Vivian is doing the driving leaving me to ponder our financial fate as a family. I’m in stasis mode waiting for a programming job offer.

I had been many things in my work history: kitchen help, draftsman, landscaper, but my last long-standing job was as a local truck driver. I had been on the job eight years when I turned my ankle badly enough one night at work to need surgery and that ended my career as a driver — a good turn, if you will.

I had to officially retire from any kind of work similar to working on docks and driving, so I went through the ‘re-invent program of New Jersey’ through unemployment. I took tests that told me that my new career should be in computers! What are the odds?

Fast forward and I’ve cheated my way through computer programming school from what was to be six months to taking me a year. Hard to program when you don’t even have a personal computer in the home. After graduation, time is passing and I have no luck getting a job in my new field. I think someone dimed me out regarding my programming prowess.

So we’re in the van now heading to LBI and I’m pondering a way to make money since no job offers look like they’ll be coming my way and I have a thought. I say to my wife, “What about a device that holds those pesky ketchup bottles upside down in the fridge?” Viv gives me a positive reaction so I run with it. I go on to explain how this would benefit mankind and she encourages me.

I call my sister, Robin, because she’s always had a mind to take an idea and make it a reality… and the bonus of having great artistic talent. I explain the shape to her and the dimensions and she whips me up a drawing. I start calling some local shops that can do the work using Lexan. I find one, I get approximately ten made and start testing them out. The design for ketchup bottles works so well, the device will hold enormous laundry detergent bottle upside down with no issues.

Now I have to try to get some catalog interested in the “IFWIS” (It Fits Where It Sits). I start cold calling catalogs like Lillian Vernon and that ilk. I’ve never done this before so each call is a little nerve-wracking because I don’t want to blow a potential sale. I got a few interested to the point where I sent them a prototype, but alas, no takers. However, I do feel good that I just didn’t spout out an idea, like so many people do, and not act upon that idea.

Now I have ideas-a-plenty and my next one is a heated toilet seat cover. Many a time in mid-winter one is called to the porcelain goddess to be sat upon. If your house is anything like mine, putting ones warmed up body on an ice cold seat is all too common. So it gave me cause to think and what I thought would work well is one of those “Hot Seats” hunters use to keep their butts warm when they’re lying in wait for some unsuspecting deer to wander by. Create a soft fuzzy exterior and fill it with those pellets so one’s own body temp gets reflected back to them instead of an ice cold seat that just saps all the heat from you and now you’re really awake! This device should also be washable…for obvious reasons.

I call my sister and in no time I have a couple of working prototypes. I must say, those things worked very well in times of chill and so I began my cold calling again. What’s important here is that I took my ideas until I hit a wall and then moved onto something else. This helps with getting over ‘failure’. This also teaches one to be optimistic and not be discouraged just because everyone thinks an idea is total crap!

While waiting to find out my latest, I hesitate to use the word “invention”, so I go with “idea”, to either sink or swim, I get another idea. This time it’s a hockey application.

As a consumer of hockey related items, I used to bitch up and down about the goods. Trappers that can’t catch a puck unless it’s right in the webbing (Vaughn T-1950, red, white & blue with matching blocker). Pads that don’t return to ‘square’ once you get up, making you have to slap them from the side once you’re back up, another stellar Vaughn product. Skates that don’t fit quite right because we lack proper pro shops and I happen to have less than average feet. And most of all, sticks that break quickly. None of this stuff, at the time, could be tried out before dropping big (enough) coin to find out what total crap it all was, but you made do because as a consumer of hockey products from ill-equipped pro shops, you didn’t know any better.

When I was in high school and needed real gear, I had to travel to Syosset, Long Island to what was then the only real pro shop that even came close to carrying pro level gear. I remember buying my Lange skates there. My Thomson pads and my ever-loving Cooper GM12′s. My hockey hero was Bernie Parent and I wanted to be just like him and that meant gear that looked like his anyway. See, back then, it was uncommon to be able to call any manufacturer to buy the same gear as the pros. Well, for a kid from Jersey it was. But back then, you just knew that Bernie or any other pro goalie was wearing the stuff he was because it worked for him, not because some company with deep pockets was paying him to wear that gear.

So back to buying crummy gear from pro shops. The worst guesswork purchase was sticks. How does one tell if the one they want isn’t ready to snap on the first shot? One can’t tell, so you make your purchase based on looks. “That looks like a good one.” As was the case for me prior to a game. I was jammed for time so I went to the shop in the rink and made my selection. As it happened, the blade snapped after one shot. Dressed in my gear I waddle to the shop with the two-piece stick that I just bought as a one-piece to demand my money back. The laughter could be heard in the lobby of the rink. Well shit, I just spent $35 for a brand new stick and I have no recourse? I think not! To me this was planned obsolescence at it’s pinnacle. I’m a ‘Joe Shmoe’ here and I don’t have the kind of money to be testing sticks for various companies (that POS stick was a Christian as I recall). So I got to thinking, would goalies pay $300 plus for an unbreakable stick? I started polling goalies as they came to the rink over a period of time and most, if not all, said they would pay that much for an unbreakable stick. However, this idea was seriously flawed.

OK, so an unbreakable stick would hurt my chances of a resale, so I had to adjust my thinking. A stick that lasted longer and was more consistent than the other sticks on the market. Wooden sticks have grain issues that prevents a consistency and foam core…well, they’re made to break or at the very least have the heel go bad quicker than you’d want. No matter how I taped that heel it would always fail. I took notice and added it to my list of what’s bad about how goalie sticks are made and their durability.