Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (11 page)

7.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Did you have a little chat with the receptionist or with a secretary while you were waiting for one of your interviews today? Write down that name and send a thank-you note recalling the conversation. Of course, you can e-mail your appreciation, and that counts for something. But, disregarding the fact that I hawk envelopes by trade, a handwritten note really bursts through today’s electronic clutter. It’ll help differentiate you from the pack when you call that firm, and it won’t hurt your chances of having those calls put through, either. And, of course, the interviewer and anyone else you may have met at the company are musts on your list, as are any of the contacts you made during the day. For the past forty years I have strongly recommended you mail your thank-you notes back to the interviewers the same day.

8.
Keep notes.
I harp on this point because it’s so vital. You’re going to want to have a record of
all
your day’s meetings and calls, so when you follow up later, you know what was said, what personal information might be useful in your next conversation, and what your strategy is for your next contact. If you think I’m a nut about keeping records, let me remind you that this is the first generation that really has gotten out of that habit. Until recently, everyone wrote everything down. When Napoleon wanted to tell Josephine how much he cared, he didn’t say it with flowers or send a Candygram, he wrote a letter (and used an envelope).

9.
Volunteer.
Get involved in a cause that means something to you, whether it’s politics, the local soup kitchen for the homeless, United Way, Alumni Fund Drive, Save the Whales, Disabled American Veterans, or helping Alzheimer’s victims—what have you. I’m very active in St. Vincent de Paul, for which I have delivered speeches to the homeless and helped raise funds.

10.
Get ready for tomorrow.
Clothes in shape? Appointments confirmed? Schedule set? Sign off. You’ve had a busy day.

 

 

 

I first met Roger Schelper on the raised hardwood court of Williams Arena in Minneapolis. He was then a member of the University of Minnesota Gophers basketball team. (Roger also did track and field.) Aplastic anemia took Roger off the Gophers b-ball team in 1969. Aplastic anemia is the result of the bone marrow not producing an adequate number of red blood cells. This devastating disease can be triggered by exposure to toxins, and Roger had sprayed a goodly number of back-yards with chemicals as a young entrepreneur.

Let’s talk about people choosing to experiment with being entrepreneurs after spending most of their life working on someone else’s payroll. After I wrote
We Got Fired!
back in 2004, I was shocked at the number of people who wrote me how this book encouraged them to follow their dreams of starting their own business. People might lose their jobs and decide to give the “entrepreneurial thing” a shot. They might invest their entire life’s nest egg on a fling—a high-risk play.

 

Harvey, I was very stubborn. From the time I was about ten years old, I wanted to be my own boss. My dad worked for Pillsbury, a big corporation in its own right back then, and we were transferred all over the Midwest. I wanted the kind of continuity of being rooted somewhere for my kids. These were my inspirations.

 

At the time, bone marrow transplants were unknown. The doctors said I had six months to live, and I wouldn’t accept that. I was doing faith healers, transcendental meditation, megavitamin therapy, and ten- and twelve-day juice fasting to detoxify my system from the chemicals I had absorbed from spraying yards.

 

An entrepreneur has to have a passion . . . and be stubborn and determined. You have to believe that nothing anyone will throw in your face will stop you. Aplastic anemia played a role in this.

The stubbornness was there. I developed the passion for food as I went along.

 

I worked in retail in the Twin Cities with a start-up chain named Nutrition World. It specialized in vitamins, supplements, and health food. I got into the health food business to learn how I could heal myself. As I said, bone marrow transplants weren’t an alternative back then.

 

I grew up paying my own way from the time I was eleven. I wasn’t looking for any help from anyone. As a kid, I had eight or nine regular lawn clients in the summer, and eight or nine snow shoveling customers in the winter. I carried two paper routes. I knew you had to give service. To make money, you had to price yourself properly.

 

I was too young to know any better.

 

I had three partners. Two of the guys were friends of mine in high school. One of my partners was Bob Carlson, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer who owned Minnesota Rubber. Mick Stenson’s father was a successful owner of his own sales company. The fourth guy in the mix, Pat Woodring, was poor like me and came from Batavia, New York. He was married to a member of the Pontillo family, which pioneered pizza in upstate New York. Mick and Bob wanted to invest, and Bob had a particular interest in bringing New York pizza to Minneapolis/St. Paul. As a group, we decided to introduce Pontillo’s to Minnesota. I was designated as the point guy to do the legwork and get the idea going.

 

Our market analysis was based on common sense. People of my parents’ age weren’t familiar with higher quality pizza unless they grew up in New York or New Jersey. In those days, pizzas were almost all cracker-crust products, flattened out by a sheeter onto a screen. Shakey’s was one of the big players in the Twin Cities back then.

 

Our New York pizza product was unique. There was nothing like it in the Twin Cities. The foundation of our pizzas was freshly made “live” (yeast-risen), hand-pounded, hand-thrown dough prepared in batches several times daily and rimmed on the deck. We baked in brick ovens like they do out East—and still do. We use Sicilian Romano and the best mozzarella you can buy, which is Burnett’s in Wisconsin, twice world champion. We also distinguished our pies from New York City pizza and identified our product as “Western New York’s Finest.”

Submarine sandwiches were known in Minnesota, but authentic Philadelphia-style hot hoagies were not. The oven-baked hoagie is a sandwich named after Hog Island when this was a shipyard during World War I, and many of the workers were Italian immigrants.

 

We decided to find a spot near the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, which was also located near Macalester College and William Mitchell Law School.

I had done some reading on real estate and knew that an operation like ours had to be located to avoid barriers. The freeway was a barrier and so were the Mississippi River and downtown St. Paul. But the Highland-Macalester-Groveland neighborhood was still a rather big trading area with pretty good income levels and an attractive density of potential college student customers. The competition wasn’t heavy because there weren’t many B-1 zoned corners in this district. The corner of Grand and Cleveland was one of the few.

 

We put together an eight-hundred-square-foot, thirty-two-seat shop in the course of two and a half months. I did the contracting—the grunt work—which included running errands for the skilled craftsmen, some of whom were college buddies. We opened on an embarrassingly small shoestring budget. Keeping your going-in costs down is a very important survival factor in launching an entrepreneurial business.

The first shop started out staffed with five kids, and I worked eighty to ninety hours a week. The business had a small bank loan, and I said I wouldn’t give myself a raise until it was paid off. We opened our doors in October 1975. By the summer of 1976, we paid off the loan, and I gave myself a raise from $600 to $800 a month. With the hours I was working, I finally made it over the minimum wage hurdle! In 1977, we opened the second store in Riverside by the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College, and a large hospital complex.

 

Harvey, I now teach classes in entrepreneurship. The first lesson I drive home: Because 90 percent of all entrepreneurial ventures fail in the first five years, you need to do something you love.