Here's a small example of my enterprising nature...
One day, in (about) 2000, the owners of my local coffee shop were in a panic because they had just learned that Starbucks was going to be opening a shop right across the street from them.
I had already bought my AAPL stock by then, and was an avid (and technically knowledgeable) user of Apple's products.
There was a lot going on with Apple around that time. The original iMac had been released, the Spaceship Airport WiFi was out, and the iPod was soon to come.
At the time, there wasn't any such thing as smartphones, laptops weren't WiFi capable, and there weren't many public WiFi hotspots available.
It was the Internet Cafe era.
I asked the owners of the coffee shop if they'd be interested in having me set up computers for customer use, as a way to differentiate themselves from Starbucks.
I offered to buy, install and maintain the computers in exchange for half the revenue they generated.
They weren't sure, so they asked if we could do one on a trial basis.
I arranged for a DSL on their existing phone line, plugged the Airport into the modem, brought in a table and set up a G3 iMac and connected it wirelessly to the Airport.
We charged $6/hour to use the iMac, and kept the mouse in a binder at the counter.
Customers would come to the counter, log out the mouse in exchange for their drivers license, and use the computer.
Within a week, during peak hours, there were people waiting to use it, and the owners asked me to set up another one.
The second one still wasn't quite enough, so we ended up with three.
Over the next three years, we took in over $40,000 in rentals.
Things changed, technology advanced and by 2004, internet cafes had lost ground to laptops and hotspots.
As income tailed off, the owners decided to take the computer rentals in-house so they wouldn't have to split the dwindling revenue with me. I understood, and wished them well.
That business came at a perfect time for me, and was poetic in a way, because I had borrowed the money I used to buy AAPL in 1998, and I used Apple products to generate the money I needed to pay off that loan. |
