my first job Gary V

My First Job: Flower Salesman... Sort Of

My First Job: Flower Salesman... Sort Of

October 29, 2013

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I’m actually a little embarrassed about what my first job was. Because I’m an entrepreneur, and because I came up in a family business, I’m not going to have the cliché, romantic story about flipping burgers or working at Wal-Mart. Mine’s a little bit more “immigrant.” I wasn’t born in this country, and I was fortunate enough to have a family who worked really hard and had their own small business. My father had a great liquor store in New Jersey which I went to work for when I was fourteen, so many people might look at this and say that my first job was getting paid $2/hr to go bag ice in my dad’s liquor store.
But that’s not the case.
I would say that my first job was when I was 5-going-on-6. It was in Edison, New Jersey in the summer of 82, and I was an entrepreneur from the very beginning. My neighbors on Teaberry drive were lovely people. I think they were retired at that point, had no kids, and lived in a nice little ranch right next to our townhouse. I remember they had these beautiful flowers, and I remember going up and ripping these tulips (or daisies, or who knows what they were) out of the ground, putting a few of them together in a bunch, and cleaning them off. I walked up to the door, rang the door-bell, and I said: “Would you like to buy some of these flowers?”
And true to the great 80s vibe in the neighborhood, and the luck of Joanne being such a nice lady, she offered to buy her own flowers back from me for 5 cents (by the way, those 5 cents felt like $5.5 million to me back then). I was so pumped. So jazzed! Too bad she didn’t realize she was feeding a dragon and for the rest of the summer, I’d be running around the neighborhood ripping flowers out of the poor people’s yards and trying to sell them back.
I’m not proud of it, per se, but I can also reconcile it with the fact that I was a very, very young child. What I am proud of is that I understood the structure of the business: I had zero overhead. No cost of inventory. I didn’t sit on the inventory very long, so it had great turnaround. And, frankly, the profit margins were as good as any other business I’ve ever been involved in.
So you might say that it set the tone. My first job was an excellent preview into the rest of my career… except that I’ve become a dramatically more honest businessman.
Photo: the author at the time, with sister Liz.
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Gary Vaynerchuk

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