For a young person, passion can be as frivolous as becoming a track star or as grandiose as curing cancer. Either way through “passion, great passion” any young person can break the dispassionate, unmotivated mold that defines the more recent generations. For many this passion starts after high school, but I had an early start.
A dominant image comes to mind when I recall my earliest passion: A small freckled faced, strawberry blond boy watching my parents feverishly tossing around one of their many business ventures. They both pause, turning to me with those parent-like indulgent smiles. My mom says, “What’s the most important rule in business Korty?” Without hesitation, I reply as I had many times before, “Buy low, sell high.” I was two years old.
I’m not sure whether I was born with a passion for business or if my parents ingrained it in me, but just the thought of entrepreneurship gets me riled up. It harbors deep within me. And it has driven me to experience many early business ventures.
Many great entrepreneurs started with the lemonade stand. I was no different. However, unlike most budding entrepreneurs, my home happened to be on most of Seattle’s tourist guidebooks. At the time, my parents were renting Troll Haven—a sort of estate built by an eccentric millionaire. Artist carved wooden trolls covered our property ranging from child size to a 35 foot Cyclopes carved from a single red wood. I placed my stand in the shade of this towering monster who peered down at me through his basketball sized solitary eye. Clearly I had an early understanding of strategic marketing. I was ten years old, and a seed was more than planted; it had germinated. I was hooked on entrepreneurship.
It took two years before I discovered Ebay, an entrepreneur’s playground. Over the next year or so, I tested the Ebay market with everything from a snowboard (boy was that hard to ship) to motorcycle parts. It drove me to learn the ins and outs of computers, and through it I became a confident writer and communicator. Then, because of economic hardship, we moved back to where I was born, Southern California. This was a big change for a kid who spent most of his child hood on the outskirts of a large town of five hundred residents. On the other hand, my Internet ventures had let me see a larger world, and I wanted more. I soon saw opportunities galore in the then 9th largest economy in the world. Using what I had learned at two years old, I bought used motorcycles at low prices (with the help of my brother and especially his driver's license) and resold them and their parts to people all over the nation and even the world.
While it was successful, I knew that if profitability was to go up, I was going to have to import a finished, profitable, and shippable item. I spent months researching, pricing, and comparing products from manufacturers and wholesalers from around the world, sometimes staying up late into the night waiting for emails from Hong Kong and South Korea. To make a long and complicated story short, I was able to import PDA keyboards and other electronics. In December 2002, we did gross sales of approximately $20,000. Through this venture, I had found monetary profit and an invaluable education in small business. More than that, I discovered a sense of how small the world could be. I even got to meet one of my main suppliers who had flown in from Hong Kong for Comdex, one of the largest electronics expos in the world. However, it was my parent's most recent venture that has rendered me the largest personal growth.
My freshman and sophomore years, for the most part, were spent helping my mom launch her real estate career in California. I learned every inch of the business, from sales to real estate law. So, when my parents decided to purchase a real estate franchise and build a brokerage of entirely new agents, all of the business knowledge, people skills, and confidence had accumulated into something that I could effectively use. I had a wide breadth of knowledge that I drew upon to help our new agents become successful. They in turn used this knowledge to better serve and help their clients to find new homes and lives in our area. With a truly family effort, our office has, in one short year and a half, gone from one agent to nearly one hundred newly licensed agents. We did this only with strong emphasis on training and service incorporating a passion that kept me working as much as thirty hours a week and my parents easily twice that.
Yet again my passion for business had put me in the field at an early age, and I soon found the first half of my highschool years well spent. It follows that for the past year and a half, I've come to a crossroads. Either to go into a real estate career in which I could, with the help of my family, make more money than most people with masters do or go to college. Surely the first looked more enticing than the later. Though during my first two years in highschool I hardly considered college, I have, directly through my impassioned business experiences, grown into someone with a never-ending thirst for business. Following that passion once again, I am applying to one of the best business universities in the country.
Victorville foreclosures.
