When Entrepreneurship Became the Only Option

I don’t know about you, but for me, coming out of high school was a terrifying experience. We work so hard toward this essentially-inevitable goal of graduating and when it finally arrives, the prospect of what to do next is intimidating, to say the least.

Let me tell you how “cool” I was after finishing high school. I graduated a year early and decided to take a year off before starting university. It was the early 1990s, I was seventeen years old and many inches short of my (thankfully-achieved) eventual height. I lived in my parents’ basement and worked in the kitchen at IHOP. I have always enjoyed pancakes, and not that there’s anything wrong with IHOP, but for a typical teenager with budding hormones, riddled with awkwardness, and just starting to try to find his way in the world, IHOP wasn’t exactly a hotbed of social interaction. In hindsight, it was probably perfect for me. It was a great place to start. The expression, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” certainly applied here and, at the time, I wasn’t particularly skilled at envisioning proverbial greener pastures. However, one thing was clear: I wanted something different, even if I didn’t know what it would be.

IHOP wasn’t my first job, though. When I was six years old, I was with my family at the Bridge Lake Stampede and Rodeo in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. It was the early ‘80s and, though I don’t remember a tremendous amount from that time, I certainly remember my first taste of entrepreneurship. At my father’s suggestion, I discovered that if I rounded up the empty beer bottles at the feet of the friendly spectators around us, I could take them back to the point of purchase and get a shiny quarter for my efforts. I couldn’t believe it. I was immediately hooked. Although I was trading my time and efforts for money, which some might argue is the pure definition of a “job” as opposed to true entrepreneurial aspiration, don’t miss the point here!

It was at this job that I realized the harder and faster I worked, the more I was compensated. At that point, I, of course, had no perspective on what it meant to have a job. However, that beautiful, hot summer day came to my mind many times during my teenage years, as I contemplated how bizarre it was that no matter how hard I worked as an hourly employee at the gas station or fast-food restaurant, I got paid the same. I preferred the previous concept. My parents had to tear me away from the stands that day. Needless to say, I lost all interest in the rodeo events as the jingle of coins grew louder and their weight heavier in my pocket.

IHOP, as a successful, multinational restaurant chain, obviously had established systems and processes that led to and maintained their success. My experience working there, though, was that those systems and processes weren’t preached to common hourly employees as much as in future places I worked.