HAMSTER BOY

Guest Post by Starfcker

There has been a lot of chatter on here lately, from people interested in starting their own business. It occurred to me that the last 20 years have conditioned people to think things that aren’t viable businesses , are actually businesses. Think of the bank ads on TV. Cupcake stores, doggy day care, food trucks. Race to the bottom type stuff. Big overhead, low return. The idea of inflating value as opposed to adding value is pretty shaky ground for a business plan. The real problem can be looked at this way. You can’t manufacture anything cheaply enough in the states, or in a large enough quantity, to sell to Walmart. And you can’t retail anything, and buy it in enough quantity, or close enough to source, for it to be cheap enough so you can compete with Walmart. Good ways to waste a lot of time and money.

Not that I would discourage people from striking out on their own. But it helps to know what you are up against. Your best bet nowadays is to find a niche big enough to be worth doing, but too small for the big boys to scale up and crush you. Even in good times, the deck is stacked against you. As it should be. If you want to compete against me, you have tremendous disadvantages. My infrastructure is paid for. My people are trained. I have found all the best suppliers. My customers are happy and loyal. I’ve figured out hundreds of small things that all together reduce my costs significantly. You still have got to figure all that stuff out. How are you going to become someone’s better option?

There’s a lot of other factors involved, time, willingness to pour money into the black hole, patience, and belief that, against all odds, you can succeed. I read something one time about making an independent film, basically if you weren’t willing to throw everything you had at it, every dime, every minute, to complete it, if everything else you had in your life couldn’t be your second priority, you would never get it done. That means roping in everybody you could, your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your business partners, your acquaintances and being able to keep them all on board, start to finish, even when the going got rough, rough, rough.

That’s a part of the process that doesn’t get discussed enough. Starting a business from nothing is a magic trick. You’re creating something from nothing. You’re a magician. A great idea is worthless. What has value is having the skill set to take an idea (nothing) and turn it into a business (something). One good way to wrap your head around this, is to think about a business as an organization. Your job, as the owner, is to organize. I got my entrepreneurial start early. It’s a dumb story, but it gives you some idea of how your thinking needs to be, if you really want to create something out of nothing. The vision thing. When I was 12, somebody opened a pet shop in the little plaza by my house.

I rode my bike up there and somehow got the nerve to ask the owner if I could have a job. He said okay. Basically all I did was clean cages, and feed and water the critters. He was a breeder of small exotic animals. And so it was fun, I got to play with all kinds of monkeys, parrots, reptiles, great stuff for a little kid. My pay was $20 a week, but it was a good gig. All the other kids from the neighborhood came to the pet shop all the time, so I had some stature as well. I could hand them a macaw, pull out a boa constrictor, or bring out nice fluffy puppies. Whatever. High-status gig for a little kid. This was 1972. They came out with all kinds of plastic hamster caging and toys that year.

They had some big space station type thing called a Habi-trail, it was a bunch of clear plastic boxes and tubes that connected together, you could add to it endlessly. We had a gigantic Habi-trail set up in the front window. People gathered outside to watch the hamsters run around in the little plastic tubes. It sounds quaint now, but people loved it. They also had this plastic ball that you stuck the hamster in, and he rolled around on the floor inside the ball. We sold lots of hamsters, and lots of that plastic stuff. In those days every hamster was brown. But every once in a while we will get one that was different, a cream color, or a cinnamon color, or one with a white band around the belly.

But they were unusual and very hard to get. So I suggested to Ralph, the owner, that he should let me keep the pretty ones and set them up in the back, and let me produce them. They had little books in the store about hamsters, and I had been reading about how easy it was to breed them. Ralph thought that was a good idea, so we did it . At first, total failure, all the babies were brown. My dad had an Encyclopedia Britannica at home, and he suggested I look up Mendelian genetics. So I did, and learned about recessive genes and all that. I was making gene carriers. It would take another generation. Luckily, the life cycle for hamsters is very rapid. Breeding them out for two generations did not take long at all. Bingo.

We had the fancy colors we wanted. instead of $2 each, we sold the colored ones for $4 each, and for every colored baby we sold, Ralph gave me a dollar. And we sold a lot of hamsters. The Habi-trail and the plastic ball really made hamsters one of our best items. Having the colored animals really helped, as no one else had them. Soon, I was producing hamsters in the soft colors with the white band around the belly and was quite proud of myself, double recessive, as no one had really seen them before. They were very attractive. We sold them as fast as I can produce them, and Ralph was very happy because he sold lots of cages and food. All that stuff is where a pet store makes their money.

Then came my big break. They had built a new mall, the Hollywood Fashion Center, which was a big deal back in those days. Every mall back then had a chain pet shop called Doctor Pet Center in them. We went to the mall a lot, It was very modern and entertaining. One day when browsing through the pet shop, I saw something that immediately made the wheels start turning in my head. The Doctor Pet Center had hamsters with long hair. Teddy bear hamsters, they called them. They were brown, but they were crazy looking. They also had white hamsters, and white hamsters with brown spots. I had been working in a pet store, I had never seen anything like these things. But my mind raced ahead right away, and I could picture all these various hamsters that I had at the pet store and in front of me in the doctor pet center with the long hair.

It looked like a gold mine to my 12 year old self. I was with my mother and I asked her if she would buy all the hamsters for me right then and there. I told her I would pay her back as soon as we got home. She knew I had been saving money from working at the pet store, and for some unknown reason, she agreed to do it. It was like a dozen hamsters, at $8 apiece, unheard of money for a bunch of hamsters in those days, but I knew they were special. Turned out to be a great move, Doctor Pet never got more. What I had going for me was I had all the pieces in my head. I was an experienced hamster breeder. I knew how recessive genetics worked. And I knew that the market for even mildly different hamsters was huge. Put all those pieces together, and I was going to show the world something it had never seen before.

Right place, right time, right insight. When I got home I asked my dad if he could help me design a cheap cage out of wire mesh. I told him I wanted to put up shelves in my bedroom on one wall and breed as many hamsters as I possibly could. I have no idea how my parents agreed to all this, but they did. My dad was a sport, he put shelves on the wall and built me a bunch of great little wire cubes to raise the hamsters in. They sat in little pans , it was a very efficient setup. The only price they extracted from me was, if I didn’t keep it clean and not smelling it had to go. No chance of that happening. By this time, i had every cent I had saved invested in this. The hamsters I bought were about a month old, takes about another month or two for them to become mature.

I figured out what I had, sex wise and bought some more stock from the shop I worked at, so I had all the different colors. Most shops at that time just had the regular brown hamsters. I now had cream, cinnamon, albino, brown, spotted (pied), and I had the cream and the cinnamon and the brown with a white band around the middle. Now the trick was to get these all into the long hair. It didn’t take long, hamsters have a lot of babies and they have them fast. The long hair was another recessive gene, so it took two generations to start to get the result I wanted. One of the first really good ones I produced was a cream-colored long haired male I named Tuffy. I had a flea comb made for cats and I was obsessed with combing his hair.

He was an amazing looking critter, his hair got four or five inches long and when you sat him down he had this halo of beautiful cream colored hair. I knew he would be my sales model. I’ve got to the point fairly quickly where I had a bunch of the long-haired cubs in various colors. I held back lots and lots of females so I could produce tons more, that also meant I was mostly selling males. That was important, because it made the path to someone else producing them anytime soon a little slower. Finally when I thought I had enough cubs to sell, I got the Yellow Pages out, and a map, and I mapped out every pet shop within 10 miles. I talked my mother into driving me to all the pet shops one Saturday to pitch my new product.

I brought my little spokesmodel hamster Tuffy, and I had boxes of the hamster cubs. Every pet shop I went into, I asked to see the owner and then simply dropped Tuffy on the counter, and my work was done. He was an amazing looking little beast. Remember those plastic Habi-trail cages and the plastic balls that the hamsters rolled around in were major profit items for pet shops back then, very popular. I was offering them a more desirable star of the show . I charged $4 a baby, which was the going retail rate for a fancy hamster. Every store was willing to buy as many as I would sell them. I produced about 100 every month in the beginning, this was big business for a 12 year old in 1972.

As I raised more stock, my monthly production leveled off at about 150 per month. I never had to go cold calling again, from that time on the pet shops called me, and I had orders for more than I could produce. Every two weeks my mom would drive me on my little route, and I was a small businessman. I kept detailed records of what I spent and what I made for the first few months, but after a while, I only kept one number, my bank balance. I raised those teddy bear hamsters for about three or four years. Never in that time, did a competitor emerge, and none of my customers ever tried breeding them on their own. I found a niche and busted It wide open. When I turned 16, I bought my first car with the money I earned raising those hamsters. The hamster craze sort of fizzled about the same time, but since I had a car I was able to go out and get a decent job.

I knew even then that I wanted to run my own business. I liked working, and I liked having my own money from an early age. I got my first apartment when I was still in high school. No problem with my parents or anything, I was just ready to be independent, and I could afford it. That little hamster business that I started when I was 12 years old was the backbone of my independent thinking. But I tell this story, not for nostalgic reasons, or to impress you with how clever I was, but to pound home the concept of an actual business. The framework is all there. There were wholesale suppliers of hamsters already, and they could produce as many as they could sell. If I had just raised brown hamsters, I wouldn’t have had any way to break into the business. But I saw a way to vastly improve the product and raise the demand, a way to raise the price significantly without any extra cost of production, and I was willing to bet on myself without hesitation, when that opportunity arose. I didn’t have the ability to do any kind of real analysis at that age, but I was sure I could do this, and that it would work. So I jumped.