See The Potential

So if you worked at it. You could get at least one person a week who needed their pets looked after. You co-ordinated with them, for feeding times, feeding type and location. And tried not to accidentally let the animals get out. Animals, who were terrified having a stranger feeding them. Intent on escaping or going missing, as occasionally happened. So seven dollars for the week felt pretty good. What didn’t, was the fact that our mother tended to offer our feeding services to people going on holiday free of charge. That tended to interfere with financial planning. In fact if anything got in the way of our potential financial empire building, it was usually the generosity of our mother’s kindness. “Oh, that’s all right.’ She would say. “I’ll get the boys to feed your pets while you’re away.” She would blithely offer. “No. You don’t need to pay them. They’ll be happy to do it.” And they (our potential customers) would listen to her. No payment required. And we would silently curse our mother’s generous nature. And learn (by heart) our mother’s maxim “It’s better to do something for someone else, and not expect anything as a reward.” Our mother espoused this, and we were expected to accept and agree.

The same occurred with the lawn mowing business. We were at that age of getting a weekly round of mowing lawns going. We had a push mower (not even a motor mower) and a catcher. We worked out that we could get about three lawns done in a day on the Saturday and still have Sunday off (to attend church with the family unfortunately). Or we could get one done on Friday evening, and then two or three on Saturday. At five dollars a lawn we were looking at around twenty dollars a week. Then there were two hiccups to our financial lawn mowing dream. One, was that wonderfully generous nature of our mother, who, on hearing us getting into the frame of mind to mow lawns, once again offered our services for free to several of the older local people. Free. It took away two potential lawn mowing openings in our plan, so that effectively halved any possible earnings. Shared, the ten dollars was down to five dollars each. The second was, we didn’t actually own a lawn mower. Well, our father did. We thought we could just use it. Since we had to mow our lawns at home (for free). Admittedly we could be pretty reluctant when asked to do them. The push mower took a bit of work. But we thought if we were earning our own spending money, then it would be worth it. Never really discussed it with him. Our mistake. When we did the cost of maintaining the mower was suddenly brought up. The sharpening of the blades, the lubricating. Wear and tear seemed to be the real issue. We rapidly lost interest once our earnings for four of five hours work, dropped to about two dollars each.

(Continued tomorrow)