Business Marketing and Ownership
After he got done with Harvard Business School, he purchased a business in the 70’s buying and selling bankrupt businesses, which was the worst job he ever had because it was extremely depressing. This was because he was taking businesses that people had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into and still ended up failing. He bought a business that he quickly regretted buying: three old movie theaters.
When he had finally gotten rid of all of the other businesses in the late 70’s, he got bogged down with these three movie theaters that nobody seemed to want. The worst part of the job for him was talking to the slimy men from Hollywood about what movies he would show in the movie theaters the next week. He would talk to them, agree on the movies, sign a contract, and that would be it. However at the last minute, the guys would almost always call and bail out of delivering the movie. He was nailed by this business for about a year and a half, the entire time he owned it he was trying to sell it. My mom worked there for a summer too, running the concessions and trying to get her projector’s license. You needed a license to run the projectors because there was a small fire inside them that projected the movie, and if you weren’t careful, you could burn down the entire theater. When he finally found a buyer for the movie theaters, he got a job as a consultant for high technical market research for many different cooperate companies. He loved consulting for high technical market research because, even though he wasn’t specifically engineering the new products, he still knew about them and got to research them. One specific product he researched was the 3D printer, invented in 1986 by a company called 3D Systems. DuPont hired him to figure out whether or not the market would be high for the 3D printers, so they could figure out if they wanted to buy them or not. Grandpa strenuously worked to give them the best answer he could. The market for 3D printers was not high. DuPont never ended up buying them because they were told they would never be in high demand by my grandfather, and they wouldn’t be in high demand for another twenty to thirty years. |
He spent the next ten years consulting for various companies like DuPont, General Electric, and Raytheon, and found that the more you charged, the more people are willing to listen to you. Who was going to listen to some old guy giving free advice, especially when you’re only thirty? I know that I probably wouldn’t, even if what he was saying was completely 100% true.
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