In the small towns of rural northern New Mexico kids find all sorts of unusual ways to get in trouble, particularly during the harsh winter months that keep them confined indoors. So the communities began to organize basketball leagues to keep the troublemakers busy. The centuries old rivalries between the towns insured that parents and entire extended families would get involved. As the only grandchild of a local high school basketball star, I was immediately enrolled in the league. No one paid much attention to the fact that I loathed the sport and that it, in turn, appeared to have a distaste for me as well.
It didn’t take long before I noticed that the older kids up in the stands were getting paid $5 an hour to keep score. Successfully making the argument that I was far better at math than basketball, albeit much to my grandfather’s disappointment, I convinced the organization to put me on the payroll. It didn’t take much longer for me to notice, from my perch up in the stands, copious bags of chips, candies and Gatorades flowing from parent handbags. The stands were packed with family members and countless uncontrollable children who darted about the gym awaiting their game or fanning interest in their siblings’. A captive market was presented.
At 11 years old I didn’t think of my proposal to set up a concession stand at the weekend basketball tournaments as a business concept. I thought of it as a grandiose money-making scheme that would garner untold riches, already spent in my head on model rockets and fancy colored pencils. My mother, however, only agreed to support my venture under the terms of garnished wages. While I would receive a modest reward, most of the profits would be put into a college savings account, untouchable for what at the time appeared to be an eternity. With an unusually acute awareness of the importance of this savings account that would someday buy me a one way ticket out of small town New Mexico, I agreed without protest.
So began a near decade long endeavor that committed 12 weekends of my every winter to slinging snickers bars and frito pies at the community basketball games. I started slow, simply buying candy and colas at Sam’s Club and marking up the individual items. When I moved into lemons and pickles I saw the potential for much higher margins in less-processed foods. Then came the nachos. Oh, the nachos were horrible – having to put the vats of plastic cheese to melt in a crock-pot early in the mornings. Cleaning up the gym at the end of the day reached untold levels of terror too now that the plastic cheese had hardened to every surface. Still, I moved up and into frito pies – my highest margin item. Except I didn’t know what a profit margin was. I was calculating everything out on a large manual calculator and bagging stacks of nickels and dimes by hand. I try not to think of the precious childhood time that a computer would have saved me, much less an Iphone!
As I approached 16 and obtained my driver’s license I certainly could have landed a “real job” serving ice cream or waiting tables along with most of my peers. Yet I was actually making more money in my 12 weekends of work than I would have made in a full-time summer job! Somehow my concession stand had turned out to be remarkably profitable. I was accused of charging exorbitantly high prices, yet no one hesitated to pay them and despite being teased as “greedy” for not granting freebies to friendlier acquaintances, I took it in stride. Best of all, I did not have to take orders or report to a boss, a concept that did not appeal to me. I simply sat at my little table doing my homework or leisurely reading until the half-time rushes. As an unforeseen bonus, the money from my winter gig allowed me to pursue more prestigious but less profitable endeavors during my summer vacations. I volunteered at Habitat for Humanity and led an art camp for younger kids. I was certain that these would pay off in dividends when it came time to apply for college. Slinging frito pies and chips covered in plastic cheese, 25 cents extra for jalapenos, turned out to be the ideal job.
As I grew older more opportunities to spend my profits arose. Gas money, visiting schools and scholarly programs in D.C. I never dared inquire of the college account’s balance. My mom maintained my mutual funds, back when those were a safe investment, with both diligence and secrecy. When it was finally time to go off to university and I was granted full scholarship I still did not inquire after the college fund. We agreed that the funds would be allocated to incidental expenses such as living expenses and travels. I lived comfortably on what I garnered from summer internships and a research position during term. Perhaps less comfortably than some, but subsisting off Nutella for a summer in London and enduring a surprisingly harsh Spanish winter without heat during study abroad only makes for better stories later in life.
So when I graduated and started my first full-time job, I was surprised when my mom handed off the paperwork for a $35,000 Fidelity account into my name. As it turned out, she’d been covering my incidental expenses in college all along. Remarkably, the frito pie profits had been comfortably sitting in stock at a time when the markets were reaching record highs. She hinted that the money might be used for graduate school, but entrusted me with sole ownership.
It never dawned on my pre-teen self that the money from my first job, coincidentally in a cottage food business, would someday go on to help dozens of people start their own food businesses someday. It was a strange twist of fate that the money would eventually go on on to help fund Kitchen Incubator, yet I am certainly glad that I spent those years slinging frito pies and I hope that you are too!

Tags: No Comments