I was five years old the first time I ran a business. My family was living in Madison, Wisconsin, where my father was completing his medical specialty in ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin. Our house sat about two blocks from the university's football stadium, which meant that on game days our quiet street turned into a river of cars hunting for somewhere to park.
The opportunity on the front lawn
Like a lot of the families in the neighborhood, ours had something every one of those drivers wanted: open space. My neighbors had figured this out long before I did. On game days they would stand at the edge of their yards holding hand-lettered cardboard signs that read "Parking, $10," waving cars onto their grass one after another. To most kids that was just background noise. To me it looked like the most obvious idea in the world.
So I made my own sign and went to work.
Becoming the kid with the sign
There I was, five years old, standing at the curb on game day, holding up my sign and directing cars onto our lawn. I would line them up, collect the cash, and wave in the next one. On a good afternoon I would make fifty or sixty dollars, which to a five-year-old felt like a fortune. Without knowing the words for any of it, I had walked straight into supply and demand, location, and pricing. People needed parking, we had the spot, and the price was whatever the sign said.
Every business has a messy side
It was not all clean profit. Football crowds being football crowds, some drivers came back for their cars long after the game ended, and not always sober. One group left their car parked on our lawn for two full days before they returned for it. My mother, understandably, was not thrilled to have strangers' vehicles camped on the grass into the work week.
That was my first lesson in something I would relearn many times over: every business comes with operational headaches and customers who do not behave the way you would like. The revenue is the fun part. Managing what happens after the sale is the actual job.
What a five-year-old actually learned
Looking back, the parking business taught me more than I realized at the time. I learned that opportunities are often hiding in plain sight, that you do not need permission or a perfect plan to begin, and that money earned comes attached to responsibility. I also learned that I loved it. The whole cycle of spotting a need, doing the work, and being paid for it lit something up in me that never switched off.
I have started a lot of companies since that lawn in Madison. The tools got more complicated, but the instinct never changed. That instinct, the one that makes a person look at an ordinary afternoon and see an opportunity, is exactly what the Patrick Horsman Foundation Scholarship exists to reward in the next generation of founders.
The opportunity was hiding in plain sight. I just had to pick up the sign.