I have been self-employed my whole adult life and have done many different things. I can remember back when I was in high school thinking to myself, “What do I want to do for a living?”. All my friends were getting ready to go off to college and there I was without the resources to continue my education at some fancy state school. To make things even more confusing, I had to overcome the challenges of attention deficit disorder as well as dyslexia when it came to reading numbers.
So since I really didn’t have the advantage of parents who would give me good direction or financial help, I enrolled at Meramec junior college. Although I didn’t really have a clue concerning what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, it just seemed like the right thing to do. When you stop to think about it, what 18-year-old kid really does know for sure what he wants to do with the rest of his life? It’s just an educated guess.
Looking back, I knew so many different kids who changed their majors multiple times thus wasting a lot of their parents money, not to mention a bunch of wasted effort. Take into consideration that this was before anybody owned a home computer and well before the invention of the Internet or the cell phone. It was a whole different work environment and we did not have the advantages that technology offers us today.
After one wasted year going to classes, I came to the conclusion that I was going to go a different route and go into business for myself as a residential and commercial painter. I can remember driving down the subdivision looking for houses that look like they needed painting. I would knock on the door and introduce myself and mentioned that I drive down the street often and I couldn’t help but notice that their home needed some work. I then asked them if they wouldn’t mind if I could give them a quote for what needed to be done. More than not they would say sure go ahead. Again, it was a different day. Nowadays people would be more inclined to call the police if you were walking around the neighborhood knocking on doors. It was hard work just finding someone who was in need of my services let alone getting the job done. After doing this for about five years, I eventually broke into the St. Louis T-shirt printing industry.
I am now 56 years old and look back on the way I used to market my business. I am very grateful for the advantages that technology has given us as it is a very exciting time to be an entrepreneur. People now would rather sit at their kitchen table and open up their laptop, and do a relevant search like St. Louis screen printing company or St. Louis embroidery company. Instead of me having to go out and spend the overwhelming majority of my time trying to find someone to sell they, find us and all we have to do is convince them that we are going to be give them the best overall value on their custom T-shirt and screen printing order.