Blueprint to Business

CHAPTER 1The Reality of Being an Entrepreneur

“We overcome, we adapt, we figure things out, we persevere. This is the life we choose.”

—MICHAEL ALDEN

One of my businesses that I learned the most from was Zeus Juice, the alcoholic freeze pop business. After years of research and planning, the product became a reality. I was finally making my freeze pops on Nantucket at a small distillery. I had a five million dollar machine that made the pops shipped to the island. It was quite a sight, taking up half of the warehouse space at the distillery. They were not happy about that. But after it was installed in early June, we began producing. I had already presold a bunch of product and I was pretty much out of cash. I had one of my brothers and my father there to help me with production. It was such a proud moment to see these alcoholic freeze pops flying off the production line and going into cases. After a couple hours, however, we had some challenges.

The most glaring challenge was that the product, which contained liquid, leaked. Well, some of them did. We had no option for sealing these packages ourselves, so we just ran as many pops as we could, and slowly, one by one, we inspected and cleaned them, then packed them into the cases. We were there for a week, and we stayed up the whole night on the last day to finish all the product we needed. At last, we loaded up the van to head back to the mainland. As soon as we got in the van, I knew we had a problem: there was a very strong ...