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c02 JWBT144/Gordon September 16, 2009 15:37 Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA
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Unleash Your
Entrepreneurial Power
by
MichaelE.Gordon
M
y father was the cofounder of a meat processing and distribution com-
pany, and his concept of training me in the family business was to
start me at the bottom. The very bottom! “I want you to learn the business
from the ground up,” he told me. For starters, Dad put me in charge of the
company’s hamburger operation. It was a one-person business: me. I had a
500-square-foot work area, equipped with a boning bench, a meat grinder, a
patty maker, storage shelves, packaging materials, pallets, gloves, telephone,
radio, desk, and miscellaneous knives and supplies (no computer in those
days). Each morning, I would belly up to the boning bench with knife in
hand. I would take a slab of beef, debone the meat, and trim off the fat. The
next step was to cram raw chunks into the hopper. Once inside, the meat was
chopped between metal grinding blades, and out came raw ground beef. In the
second operation, another machine shaped the bulk ground beef into perfect
patties that were then packaged by a third machine. The input was chunks of
meat plus my labor, the process was mechanical chopping and molding, and
the output was packaged ground beef patties. But something really important
happened in this simple process: I added value for customers!
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