I Was 13, Bagging Newspapers, and Hiring My Friends

I was thirteen years old, bagging papers for the Fort Lauderdale News on Sunday mornings at 4 a.m. Heavy Sunday editions. The carriers needed them bagged before they could deliver, and the paper paid five cents each.

Five cents a paper is nothing. Unless you build a system.

I figured out how to bag them faster than anyone else. Then I taught other kids how to do it my way and took a penny per paper from their work. My carriers were an hour ahead of competitors because the system worked, and I made money on every paper they bagged whether I was there or not. At thirteen, I had no language for what I was building. I just knew I wanted to work smarter, not longer.

I saved every dollar. At fifteen I bought a 1968 Rally Sport Camaro with cash. I still own it.

That story is forty-eight years old. I tell it because the instinct it reveals has not changed. I was not a business prodigy. I was a kid who saw a gap (slow bagging), built a process to fill it (teach others, take a margin), and reinvested the output (the car). That is the same pattern I have followed through six companies over thirty years: find the gap, build a system, let the system run.

The lesson is not that I was special. The lesson is that the operator's instinct shows up early and it shows up the same way every time. You look at a process and you see what could be better. You build something repeatable. You hire people who can run it. And then you move to the next problem.

Every man I coach who runs a business recognizes this story, because they have their own version of it. The lemonade stand, the lawn-mowing route, the thing they built in college that made money while they slept. The instinct was always there. The question for the second half of life is whether you are still using it to build things that matter, or whether you are grinding on autopilot because the machine runs and nobody told you it was okay to step back and ask why.

The business leg of what I teach is the operator's craft: building, leading, deciding, delegating, knowing when to press and when to fold. It is the leg that most successful men think they have handled. And often they do. The numbers are fine. The company runs. What they have not handled is the part where the business consumed them, where the operator became the machine instead of the architect.

The kid bagging papers at 4 a.m. was building something. The man grinding at 55 is often just maintaining something he built twenty years ago and never stepped back from. The craft is the same. The question is whether you are still building, or just surviving what you already built.

What did you build when you were young that showed you who you really are?

~b