Silver Spooning Your Child? Watch This...
I have two boys. Brian is 33 and I have a 24 year old. So I make them work. I make them work hard. I make them start at the bottom. When Brian started with me years ago, when he graduated from Penn State, I actually wouldn't bring him into the family business. I said, you need to go out in the world because you come into the family business. You're going to be thinking, you come in, put your feet up on the table and hey, my dad's the owner and you know, I get to hang out here. It's like no, you go out.
Learn how the world works. Spend a year at least doing that. And he went to work for Sprint and was in corporate sales and I said, so what do you know after he went to a training program. I said, what are you doing today? Oh well, they came, they brought out the yellow pages and said, okay. Brian, today you call on car dealers, tomorrow you're going to call on beauty salons. It's like cold calling, right? So he got his ass handed to him for a year in a corporate environment and realized life's tough. It's not easy you get up every single day and they are on you for eight hours a day.
How many contacts, how many sales, how many this and so finally he said, can I interview in the family business and he came in and he did and he started at the very bottom. He started in the grunt positions. And you know, in product development, finding products going to trade shows, searching through catalogs etc. you know, watching the shopping channels and then as we moved him along, he got involved in all aspects of the business. He had a stint in the production side, helping produce the infomercials. And the writing side, and the operation side and product development. But at the end of all of that, after a few years, he was running As Seen On TV.com, which was one of our assets. The website As Seen On TV and so make a long story short, I have you know, the kids I haven't shared the wealth with them.
I'm making them work for it. But what I am doing is this, I end up part of my business model is working with public companies and all of that. So I'm involved with about 35 companies that I've invested in or I sit on the board and some of you know, a nice piece of those are public. So when I get stock in a public company, I now am allocating shares to certainly Brian, who's involved in these relationships and then my other son also, and now I'm letting them get in on the ground floor of some of these opportunities. I am letting them invest in some of these opportunities, if they want. And I'll help them in in some of these cases, but it's they really have to be they're self-starters and they're out there doing it. Every step of the way, the same way I did. There's no big heap of money at the end of the rainbow sitting there for them now. That's when I die, but let's not talk about that.
