The Child Entrepreneur

One summer when I was eight years old, I came up with a fool-proof money making idea that even Alan Sugar could not criticise: collecting up lots of old newspapers and turning them into cash. It was a perfect business model. Everyone had unwanted newspapers, no one minded giving them to kids and they were easy to pick up and store. We were quids in. I don't really remember who did this with me, but for the sake of the Memory Project let's say it was my brother and Adrian Conor.

The three of us went from door to door asking for left-over newspapers, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive we soon accumulated a big stack of papers. We had set quite a wide collection radius for our age, trekking along the Whartons, down The Gills and even up to the scary big houses up towards The Spite, where a lovely old woman was delighted to help and even offered us lemonade.

I also recall one particularly risque moment, when we barged into a back garden on The Gills asking for newspaper and discovered a middle aged woman bathing topless. I remember she had an exotic looking drink of some kind too - a cocktail maybe - and this struck me as just about the most decadent and sorid thing I had ever seen. Otley, a small town? Nah.

I don't think she gave us any newspapers.

Following an afternoon's gathering, it occurred to us we could make even more money by seeking sponsorship for our activities. We considered ourselves fully aware of how sponsorship worked - people gave you money for doing something - and this time we could make it work for us. If everyone in the street pledged us 1p for each newspaper we gathered, we'd be rich beyond our wildest dreams.

I grabbed a blank piece of paper, wrote "SPONSERSHIP FORM" across the top and then crudely drew a table in below in which the neighbours could declare their spoils.

"Is that how you spell sponsorship?" asked Adrian.

"Uh, I dunno," I said.

And so I went to my mom asking her how to spell sponsoship, and she asked why we were asking, and I explained our amazing money making scam, and she revealed that the reason no one else was making money being sponsored to do relatively mundane tasks is because sponsorship is for charities. It isn't usual to ask for people to sponsor you money just for - you know - buying sweets with.

Oh, we said.

My mother then enquired what we proposed to be sponsored to do. We explained in broad terms about the newspapers, leaving out the bit about the topless lady with the dry martini. Fortunately, my mother has the insight of the superior class of business analyst, and asked almost immediately, "And what will you do with all the newspapers afterwards?"

When we explained we would turn them into cash, she turned the question on us with the cunning of a barrister: "But how?"

And that was when we realised our plan to collect huge numbers of old newspapers and convert them into cash had not been thought through to the final stage. The sheer logistics of gathering and storing so much waste paper had been such a challenge in itself, we hadn't bothered to work out how to monetise our project. And thus my first business venture ended with my dad driving us down to the chip shop to see if they would pay pennies for old newspapers to wrap chips in, and we learned that health and safety regulations now required takeways to use fresh, food-grade paper for their wrappers, and we ended up chucking the lot in a newspaper recylcling skip in the middle of town and making fully no money whatsoever.

Our only profit was the fish and chips my dad bought to console us with.

[Time: Summer 1984]