Early Business

On a typical hot summer day in the Philippines, I was sitting down along with my friends figuring what we can do for the summer. I suggested something that would be productive such as earning money, and as a result my friends got excited and asked me to lead it as they follow along. I took advantage of my parent's company which was in garments/textile, so when I went to the factory, I got numerous excess products that we have like bags, caps, t-shirts and basketball uniforms. When I gathered all of those products, I also gathered my friends so that I could tell them that those are the things that we are going to sell in order to earn money. Since this was all new to me, I wanted to make it exciting for all of us by having a strategy on selling those things. I made labour division, by positioning my friends to different task; I being the leader stayed at a so called office in my friend's room where I spent most of my time thinking, planning and organizing while also got one of my friend to be my secretary to write everything down (may it be from accounting the money to cheats of a video game). I partnered up my friends as they will be the ones selling the product to different zones around my neighbourhood. In my opinion, I got them partnered up because one or two could do the talking while at least one of them will carry the products, demo it if they had to and run back to the "office" whenever they ran out of products. We spent so much time planning before we even started selling, wherein I thought them a little marketing by teaching them to speak politely to customers and the pity tactic by mentioning to the customer that we are doing this so that we could buy school supplies for the following school year to come. I gotta say, it always worked! Since we din't have any cellphones back then, I had walkie-talkies supplied so that we could all monitor our activities and if ever one of my friends were being looked for by their moms. We did not sell things everyday for various reasons but on that one day that I'll never forget, we were able to sell all of our products that gave us 1,120 pesos approximately $27 canadian dollars. At that time, that was big money already for us and I gave everybody their shares from all of the hard work and surprisingly, had money to spare to buy us that pizza dinner. As we were enjoying that pizza dinner, I was watching my friends as I saw smile from each and every one of them. For me, the success was not really much about the money we have earned but the fact that I was able to create something that did not only benefited me but my friends. I was only 11 years old.