Get the newspaper on the porch.
That’s it. Get the newspaper on the porch, every time, on time, without fail, and the world will find you.
I started my first business when I was 12 years old. I was an independent contractor with the Hayward Daily Review. Okay, I was a newspaper boy, and I will admit to being the beneficiary of nepotism. My father was the Managing Editor of the newspaper. That made it easier to get the job, but it also made the job considerably more difficult to do. As son of the editor, I had standards to uphold.
Delivering newspapers was the most successful business I ever ran, though not in terms of gross revenue. Since a month’s subscription price for everyday delivery was $1.75, my monthly revenue never ran more than $140. Out of that, the most I ever netted was $21. That was 26 cents per customer per month, tops.
And there were no guarantees. I was truly an independent business kid. The first $1.45 of each monthly subscription went to the Daily Review to pay for newspapers. I also had to buy supplies and equipment ─ my canvas carrying bag, rubber bands, and wax paper for wrapping the newspapers on rainy days. God, I hated rainy days.
And there was another big cost with which I became very familiar: bad debt. My paper route was along the lower half of East Avenue in Hayward where many apartments and rental houses were located. That meant lots of customer movement. The good part of that was, new people were always available to subscribe to the newspaper. The bad part was, every month one or two subscribers would skip without paying. Those losses came directly out of my cut.
The work was back-breaking and relentless, every afternoon except Sundays when I had to have the papers delivered by 7am. Two hours a day, rolling and banding, packing, transporting, and delivering inky hunks of newsprint door-to-door. (That did not count the ten hours I spent collecting money from my customers each month. Accounts Receivable!) My route was mostly one big hill so I wore out my knees under the weight of my papers on the way down, and then wore out my lungs on the way back up.
In the 18 months I worked as a paper boy, I got two weeks off. That was for my family vacation. But I had to find another kid to deliver papers in my place, and I had to pay him a set price, no percentages, to do the job─$20. That was one of the most expensive vacations I have ever taken.
But I didn’t mind any of that as long as I could avoid the most difficult job of business, selling. I hated to sell! From the day I started, the circulation manager was constantly after me to sell new subscriptions. “Each day after you have finished your route, go to five houses,” he advised. “Ask them to subscribe. Just five houses.”
He may as well have asked me to go to 500 houses a day. I couldn’t do it. The very idea of approaching someone I didn’t know and asking them, face-to-face, to buy a subscription filled me with boundless terror. (It still does.) Even worse, once a month, the circulation manager would shanghai a half dozen of us paperboys and take us off in an Econoline van to strange neighborhoods for “circulation drives.” The idea was to claim at least 20 new subscribers for the Daily Reviewbefore going home. But I couldn’t see the point. If I couldn’t bear to face potential customers on my own route, why would I want to sell subscriptions for other paper boys in other territories?
There were prizes offered─bats and balls, day trips to the Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco, and Giants tickets─but it didn’t matter. I was panicked. I would leap from the van, race around the nearest corner and hide in the bushes for 20 minutes. Then I would return to the rendezvous point and confess complete failure. If my future depended on my ability to sell newspapers, I knew I was doomed.
Fortunately, I found there was another way to gain subscribers.
My father had allowed me to take the job based on my promise to show up for work every day, no matter how tired I was, no matter how much homework I had, no matter how much I wanted to play. I was so desperate for spending money, I gave my word eagerly. Only later did I learn what my promise meant.
Afternoons were okay but Sunday mornings were killers. Getting up at 5:00am was excruciating. I was so sleepy my eyes hurt. The third Sunday on the job, I overslept. My father woke me up. I was in despair. I would never get the papers delivered on time! “This is what having a job means, showing up for work every day,” my father said. And then he offered to drive me on my route, this time only.
I felt as if I had been reprieved from a chain gang! I stacked my unrolled newspapers in the back of our Ford station wagon and off we went, my father at the wheel and I perched on the lowered tail-gate of the car. (That’s how it was back then, no seat belts, no helmets, no laws, just faith that my father would not hit any big bumps.) Energized, I had all forty-two of my newspapers rolled before we arrived at the first house.
That was when I learned, reluctantly, the secret of success in business.
My father stopped at the first house on my route. Featuring a centerfielder’s arm, I winged a newspaper halfway up the walkway in the front yard. I shouted “Okay!” to my chauffeur but the car didn’t move.
“What are you doing?” my father asked. I told him I had delivered the newspaper and he could move on now. The car did not move. “Go get the paper and put it on the porch.”
“Why?”
“Your customers do not want to fetch the paper in their pajamas,” he said.
I didn’t see what the big deal was. “It’s close to the porch.”
“I want you to get that paper and, better still, put it on the doormat.”
“But the other guys don’t do that!” I protested. I was referring to the boys who delivered rival newspapers, the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle.
“They have bigger circulations,” my father said. “You have to be better.”
I still didn’t get it, but I did what he asked because all I wanted was to go home and go back to bed. When we were finished, and 42 customers had their Sunday papers on their doormats, my father left me with this instruction, “Do it like that every day.”
So, I did it like that, every day, always on the porch, usually on the doormat if my aim was especially sharp. It wasn’t easy, though. I had to hop fences when the gates were locked. I had to skip past yapping, snapping dogs. The little ones were the worst. Three times I was bitten, all by dogs no bigger than muscle-bound squirrels. The last one that bit me got punted onto its owner’s front porch. Right next to the paper.
When I started my paper route, I had 42 customers, but I lost two the first month. Deadbeats. I continued the on-the-porch grind every day for four months until, one afternoon, something remarkable happened. A woman, not one of my subscribers, shouted to me as I was delivering papers.
“Young man!” I kept walking, my head down, assuming I was in trouble. (In seventh grade, I was frequently in trouble.) The woman literally had to jump in front of me. “Young man!”
I stopped and was shocked to see her smiling at me. “You’re the one who delivers the Schmitz’ newspaper, aren’t you?”
She was referring to my customer in the house next door. I confessed that I was.
“Ellen told me how you always get the newspaper on the porch,” she said. “I have taken the Chronicle for six years now and never once have I gotten it delivered on my porch. I would like you to deliver my paper.”
My response was insightful, “Uuuhhh.” I wasn’t sure what she was asking. Did she want me to deliver her Chronicleevery day? Would my father allow me to do that? Of course, that was not what she was saying. She was quitting the Chronicle and signing up for the Daily Review in order to get her newspaper delivered on the porch. Every day.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know how to take a new order. So I just said, “Okay.” I handed her one of my newspapers and raced through the rest of my route. Ah, but I was one newspaper short at the end. I ran home to tell my mother what had transpired and what my problem was. She gave me our family newspaper and told me to run back and deliver it to my last customer.
“And get it on the porch!” she yelled.
I did. Suffused with the enlightenment of a first order, I was renewed in my purpose. Every day, on every porch! From that moment until I quit late in the eighth grade, I added two or three customers every month. Each one had to chase me down; each one expressed the same desire: Get my newspaper on my porch. My route went from 42 customers to 80 in the course of 18 months. My income went from less than $10 a month to the princely sum of $21, all because I got the paper on the porch.
No greater lesson. No greater father.