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Wow, Eldon was a Junior at the University. He started working at age 17 and learned a lot about things that he didn't think would matter long term. Now his University Advisor had taken him to lunch and raved about his Market Research project focused on a fast food business serviced by his employer and owned by a high school friend.

Since getting married the prior year, his grades had improved, and he had been inspired by some older friends at school to study more. The professor had told him he should consider graduate school and offered to help. He gave the meeting much thought and made a decision. So he decided to go to his employer and quit so that he could devote full time to studying and getting straight A's until he graduated.

Decisions are the key to success.

He knew his employer depended on him to manage the loading processes. He had memorized the cost and sell prices of the warehouse inventory of a couple of thousand items. He knew the routes each truck should follow to be efficient and arrange the delivery of the daily invoices in the best order. He knew what item could usually be substituted if an item was out, which varied with different customers in many cases. No one had ever asked him to learn those things, and he didn't think about that in his overall decision to quit.

He met with one of the company's owners and told him of his plan and that he was quitting. Something unexpected happened. The owner thought studying more and getting all A's was a good goal and said he would like Eldon to stay and continue as the loading manager but that he could be off the crew loading. He said they would put a special desk in the office and that he could bring his books and study for the full shift each night but that the loading crew would still ask him to route the trucks, cost the invoices, and answer questions. He was also offered raise and told when he graduated that the company had a job in mind.

Since Eldon thought he had made a decision, he was surprised at the outcome. He agreed to stay. He originally had been hired to receive and load freight. He started taking out deliveries because they needed to be done, and he was available. He never asked to learn things to be able to do more in the company, but he eventually met most of the customers and learned about their businesses. He eventually drove most of the delivery routes and found out how the routes worked best. He often returned to an account he had delivered to fix their coffee machines and became the official service rep. Since that service work paid a mileage fee, that was a plus. Asked to cost out the invoices a few times led to him memorizing most of the costs and noticing how different salespeople priced things. He had always attended the sales meetings because he found it interesting to learn how the products were used, but no one had ever asked him to do that.

He had especially enjoyed taking various salespeople's sales routes in the summers when vacation times came up because he enjoyed that class at the universities business school and learning about how much psychology was a valuable skill to have in that work.

Eldon had learned a lot, but his plan now was to finish school, get A's in his remaining classes, interview through the University placement offices, and find a good-paying job with a promising future, but more surprises were ahead.

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How did the successful entrepreneur find the opportunity in the first place? What sparked the idea? How can we learn to do that ourselves? What about those who make the big sale or know where to go to find the right customer? Where does their inspiration come from?

We are all on our life journeys and want to find success. We must determine what questions to ask or where to look for answers. Some stories using fictional characters can help us to answer some of the questions raised here.

When Eldon was in high school, all the guys were getting cars, and many of those same cars were working in grocery stores bagging groceries. So he went to every grocery store in town, asking for a job but had no luck. Eldon didn't know what he didn't know. There were a lot of other job opportunities in the small town where he lived, but the grocery store seemed like the only option. No class on networking offered answers, and when his mother mentioned a cousin that owned a wholesale food business, the idea of that fact being a step towards networking didn't occur to him. Still, he contacted his cousin and got a job the following summer in the warehouse.

The food wholesaler experience provided funds for car expenses and a lot of unexpected experiences. Using a hand truck, stacking freight received, loading trucks, and then taking trucks out full of groceries to deliver had never been in his life plan. One early summer morning, one of the business owners handed him the keys to a semi-trailer truck full of groceries. It was 4 AM, and he was asked to deliver the 30 stops required to empty the truck going east of town for 100 miles and stopping at several small towns. He had never driven any truck and didn't have a particular driver's license, but then it was many years ago, and he didn't know what he didn't know, so he left at 4 AM, delivered the groceries, and returned about midnight.

Over the next few years, while attending the local university, he made many truck deliveries regularly to all kinds of restaurants, schools, and businesses. He became familiar with the working conditions of National Franchises, local mom-and-pop stores, and family businesses and firsthand the atmosphere in both successful and failing businesses.

In the winter, he managed the night-loading crew and memorized the pricing and costs of all the stocked items, so he routed the trucks and costed out the invoices when the trucks were loaded.

At the University where he was majoring in Marketing in his junior year, he took a class on marketing research class that was a graduate-level course. The class was set up to allow him to pick his project. He decided to research a drive-in restaurant near his house where a friend from high school who had started his own business rather than go on to college owned the company. The business was also a customer of the wholesaler he still worked at.

That same year at the University where he majored in business, his Marketing Professor took him to lunch and told him how impressed he had been with the research he had done on the drive-in restaurant. He liked the conclusions drawn about customer profiles, where they came from to visit the business, and what brought them. With those compliments and encouragement came his offer to help open the door to a graduate degree.

Eldon had just been following what had interested him and had yet to think of his work as particularly scholarly, but he also recognized that he might be good at a more academic course.

Something happened, and that also turned out to be surprising.