Can’t sell Opossum
Meet professor Joe, he lived in our garage for a little over a year. He would meet me every morning around 4:30, I can say that the first time we met was a bit strange. As we learned to live in harmony, I started looking forward to our mornings as I meditated before my workout. Of all of the animals, the opossum has to be one of my favorites, they are a combination of weird and cute, and scarry looking yet cool. This post will go into part of the reasons why I do what I do and why I am like I am.
In 47 years of life I have sold many things, I started selling at a very young age. I read a post the other week that resonated with me, the author talked about how he started his entrepreneurial journey selling candy in school. My journey started around the same time, but what I sold was much more varied. In many ways I never stopped selling.
I can honestly say that the ability to sell is one of my strongest traits. Post college I refined my craft in the oil and gas industry. 24 years after college, I am now selling construction. At the peak of my O&G career I was selling some pretty high ticket items, but all of that experience had to start somewhere, here is the story of where it all began.
Sales and or salesmen in high school were distributed into three basic categories: candy dealers, drug dealers, and other. The candy dealers were the lowest paid but well connected. The drug dealers were the highest paid but riskier to hang out with. Then there were the others: I place myself in the other category, let’s talk about my version of other.
Louisiana is a special place, of all of the 50 states there is no state quite like it. Having spent a good portion of time there, it is only since I have been away from it that I am now able to appreciate the impact the state has had on my life. The state absolutely lived up to its name of sportsman paradise.
I have sold all the following things in no particular order before the age of 21: turtles; crawfish; mink; raccoon; otters; pecans; sweet potatoes; corn; okra; honey; alfalfa hay; horses; wood; gum; alcohol; beef; chicken; sushi; tur-duck-ens; shrimp; frogs; bulldozers; excavators; drywall; carpet; tile; wood floor; and various other things that will not be written. Of all of these things, my three favorites were pecans, sushi, and crawfish.
I learned to sell pecans when I was very young. Every year I remember crawling on my hands and knees under the huge pecan trees with my mother and grandmother. I would fill my shirt then walk it over to the 5 gallon buckets to be later dumped into burlap sacks. Pecan season lasted about a month. This is when I first learned to see opportunities all around me, in many ways, money was falling from the sky. Though, we did not sell all of the pecans, as many were kept to crack and peel for cooking. I still recall the smell of pralines, chocolate fudge, and pecan pies. Fast forward 30 plus years and I was introduced to a massive pecan business, but we will save that story for another day.
Second favorite thing I sold had to be sushi. During my sophomore year of college I spent winter break in Vail, Colorado. It was there that I learned to roll sushi. I picked up this skill from a professional Japanese snowboarder that was in the same house that I was staying in. We ate sushi just about every day. I learned some techniques and figured I could maybe use this one day. When the break was over, I went back to my job as a butcher, it was then that the idea to launch a sushi business came to life. I worked at a specialty meat market (this was one of my jobs in college), I cut meat on Friday and Saturdays. When I ran the idea by the owner, he gave me the green light and we were off. I rolled sushi for about 2 years on weekends, it was a cool job. I later used all of that experience to impress my future wife.
My personal favorite and biggest money maker was selling crawfish and trapping animals. I was blessed as a young boy to have 28,000 acres of land to call my backyard, this is where we had our camp, we owned a share in the Indian Bayou Hunting club. In 1998 the core of engineers took over the land and that chapter of my life was closed. From the time I could drive to our camp, I spent all of my free time there. Each year consisted of three seasons: hunting; fishing; and partying. For 4 years I earned a PhD. in all three. Fishing season started in February and lasted through the end of may. On weekends, while in high school, I would go out in my boat and “run” the traps. An ok day was 4 sacks of crawfish and a couple of raccoons. A good day was six or eight sacks of crawfish and a combination of minks, raccoons, and otters. Otters were extremely hard to catch! For perspective, a sack of deepwater crawfish fetched ~$30.00, a racoon pelt was $20, a mink was $50, and an otter fetched over $100. So by Saturday night I could have $500 in cash in my pocket, not too bad for a day’s work. The coolest part of the whole experience was learning to live in harmony with nature and being able to earn money by doing something I loved.
There was a phase of life where I pretended to be someone else. I pretended to be “not so country", I wanted to be sophisticated, I was a great actor and even managed to misplace my southern accent. To the surprise of my wife, as I get older the accent has found its way back. I think it’s because I have once again found myself, my authentic self. These past 7 years have been just what my spirit needed, it yearned for an adventure. The path of an entrepreneur is anything but comfortable. It is a constant struggle to sell, run operations, be there for my family, and oh yeah, try to earn a profit from which to pay myself. As I start year 7 of self employed, I am not as naive as when we started. I have seen $0.00, and guess what, it did not kill me. The examples I gave serve as a reminder to me, they teach me 3 important lessons. First; money and opportunity are everywhere, we need only be willing to pick up the coins all around us. Second; to be willing to learn new things and get out of my comfort zone, it’s funny how people seem to show up at just the right time on our journey. And last but not least; I have to show up every day, I have put out my nets, I need to check them every day, at any moment be ready to bring in a haul that will change my life.
