Starting with little Part 2

... As I made my way around the block, I HAD to STOP! I was freezing. The snow was sooh high, and my fingers were so Numb, that I could hardly separate the flyers in my hand. Which is why I only did 80 of the 150 houses!!

By the time I made it back to my house, I was tired ( No sleep from the night before) and freezing. I was actually very lucky, in that I met one gentleman on his way to work that morning and sold him on shoveling his entire driveway, walkway etc. for $20.

Hey not bad for a start. It was actually very exciting to actually be TAKING ACTION on an idea, as opposed to just thinking about it.

As I walked home, the snow was still coming down .HEAVILY!. “WAIT A MINUTE, WAIT A MINUTE!!” I thought to myself! My estimation of 20 minutes per driveway was based on me shoveling my driveway on a “Normal” light snowfall. At the rate this snow was piling up, it would personally take me MUCH, MUCH longer to do just ONE driveway…. What if the response to my “little” flyer was a HIT??? I would never be able to finish all of the driveways by myself?? (Well, my solution would be to go to the local school and ask any of the local kids if they wanted to make some cash!! This was my contingency plan… IF the add was successful)

I went to bed at 6:30 am and slept for about 4 hours….I AWOKE to the sound of a Snow Shovel!! As I looked out my window across the street, I could see someone shoveling my neighbor’s driveway…BUT IT WASN’T my neighbor!!!

OH NO SOMEBODY WAS TAKING MY BUSINESS!!!!

I quickly jumped out of bed and checked my pager. It had not buzzed at all! I couldn’t believe that NOBODY wanted their driveway shoveled. Little did I realize, that I had set my pager to off mode a couple of days earlier while I was in a movie(OOPS). When I checked my pagers voicemail however, I had 2 messages from people that had called and wanted their driveways done. ALRIGHT!! Hey…But what about the competition were they already doing MY driveways?

I quickly got dressed (no BREAKFAST!) and ran outside. There were about 3 people with shovels and a snowblower doing driveways and they weren’t my neighboors!. (I only had a shovel no expensive snowblowers) I begin to run around the block to see if anybody had put up my FLYER on the doors to inform me to shovel their driveway. (There was only one house that did this). I also knocked on the doors of the people that had paged me and let them know that I would do their driveways. (There was no way that I was going to advertise for the competition)

I casually walked up to one of the “OTHER” snowshovellers to determine how much they were charging. He promptly told me “WE CHARGE PER SEASON, so UNFORTUNATELY WE CANNOT DO YOUR DRIVEWAY, WE HAVE ENOUGH DRIVEWAYS TO DO FOR NOW!”…Ahhh Music to my ears!!!

I got my shovel and started on the driveway of the gentlemen I had met earlier in the morning….It took me 1hr and 15 minutes to complete his driveway!!!(A far cry from my 20minute estimate. I was cold and freezing, but I continued UNTIL it was done! After lunch I completed the other 2 driveways both took just over an hour as well.

I was so SORE, that I had just enough energy to finally do my own driveway. I made $60 dollars cash that day, but earned a FORTUNE in experience (I’ll talk about this in another post). I still needed to earn $40 dollars by the end of the next day to reach my goal of $100 in 48 hrs!!!

Continued in the next post “What does shoveling snow, selling computer equipment, and serving alcohol have in common?”

Thanks for reading!

Duane Adolph