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A few months ago, I was sitting on the beach in Cancun after a day spent touring the Yucatan Peninsula's greatest hits. My eighteen-year-old son Jack called with an urgent deadline. College financial aid forms were due that day.
We texted back and forth. I sent him links to tax returns, and he read the forms while I explained them. As we finished the form, I found myself explaining questions about the “nature of the income.” After we got off the phone, I tapped out a list of the ways that I have generated income over the course of my lifetime.
In the spirit of David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists, I present:
Rounding out the bottom of the list we have:
My dad was number 10. He went to a year of college, but it wasn't for him.
He worked his entire career doing HVAC sheet metal work in the union Local 46. What a difficult, dangerous job. My dad's hands had been cut so many times the callouses that grew felt like holding hands with a gorilla. His hands are a lot softer now that he's 85.
We joked with him that he failed out of tollbooth school, so he had to become a sheet metal worker.
He launched me on a different path with an haiku:
You're never going
To make any real money
Work'n for someone else
In addition to being an accidental poet, my father was practical. When I was twelve years old, like my brothers before me, I got a paper route.
I used the money I saved from my paper route to buy an Apple computer and taught myself to code. I wrote a program to solve the Rubik's Cube. I typed in a dictionary and developed a spell-checking system. I paid $100 to advertise it in a magazine, but the magazine went bankrupt before the ad got published.
I had that paper route for six years. Sometimes I wake up having dreamt that I still have it - a stress dream that I have to get up 5:30 am and deliver newspapers rain or shine. Then each week going door to door to collect cash from the customers. It seems strange that they let kids do this. This is not a job for kids anymore. But how else would this be done before credit cards?
When I was sixteen years old, like my father and brothers before me, I augmented my paper-route income with a part-time job.
I washed dishes, prepped food, cleaned pots, and emptied trucks for $4.25 an hour at Red Lobster. When I noticed how the managers were counting inventory and calculating the replenishment orders, I suggested I could write a program to do that automatically. I got paid double time as a programmer: $9.50 an hour.
During college I was a resident advisor and dorm director for free room and board. One summer, my brother-in-law was able to get me an opportunity where he worked.
I graduated college in three years and landed in my least favorite job.
Weapon systems. How TF did I end up in the defense industry? A friend from college went to Intel in 1987, which was a better place to land. I stayed where I was for the three-year program, earning a Master’s Degree in electrical and computer engineering. As soon as I finished, I left and went to business school.
In business school I met my wife, Charlotte. She was attending a nearby college. By the time we got married, we were at #3.
The time scale seems to change here. I wanted to have $100,000 in the bank before we had our first baby. That happened, and Caroline is twenty now.
My partner Jeff Abrams started working with me in 2010. He had just graduated from SUNY Binghamton. I paid him by the hour while he learned the practice.
We’ve worked together at more than 50 companies. We implemented what would become the Weekly Accounting methodology serially, one company after the other. We worked with companies in every industry and with every business model. And we kept getting better at it.
Until this week, all the leads came through referrals. This week, for the first time, we generated a lead from advertising, set up an appointment, and closed a lead that will be serviced without Jeff or me.
That's why this is such an important milestone. Rounding out the Top Ten Ways to Convert Time into Money...
We have a team we love and know, and we keep a close eye on our metrics. We do it for fun.
Introducing Weekly Accounting!