As a father of twin thirteen-year-old boys, I’m strongly encouraging them to get their first summer jobs next year. I want them to earn their own money toward a car at sixteen, to witness firsthand how taxes shrink a paycheck, and most importantly, to gain the kind of perspective that no classroom can teach: what it actually takes to build a million-dollar business.
The Backstory
During my 38-year career as an investment manager, I interviewed over 200 job applicants, from state colleges to Ivy League institutions. I designed what I thought was an innocuous question that revealed the most helpful insight into their practical business knowledge while testing their math under pressure.
After the pleasantries about college experiences and career ambitions, I’d ask a two-part question.
What is your estimate of the annual sales of the McDonald’s franchise down the street, the one with the sign out front that proudly says “Over $1 Billion Served”?
Candidates without real-world job experience sometimes fell for my trick and guessed $1 or $2 billion, revealing they had no perspective at all. Others would guess $150,000 to $300,000 for a business running 16 to 20 hours a day with 30 employees. I didn’t hold it against them just yet, but I could see the nerves setting in.
For the second part, I’d hand them a blank sheet of paper and ask them to build a simple financial model to support their estimate, no calculators, no phones. The more analytically gifted candidates would dive deep, trying to estimate quantities of every menu item and its cost until the page was full and they were fully confused. Others would work from daily traffic and average customer spend, then multiply by 365 to get an annual figure. I was often disappointed watching graduates from the best universities struggle with basic arithmetic under pressure and arrive at numbers that made no sense.
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The Answer Came from an Unexpected Place
One evening, while enjoying a massage, I asked my therapist, Ben, who had never set foot in a college classroom if these questions were fair. He answered quickly and with reasonable accuracy. When I asked how, he explained that he’d worked at a pizza shop as a teenager. When they hit $1,000 in daily sales, the owner would buy the staff a free pie to share. So, he figured McDonald’s did a lot more than $1,000 a day, guessed around $6,000, and multiplied it out in his head on the spot, over $2 million a year.
Ben had something many of those Ivy League candidates often lacked: perspective.
The Main Point
In a world full of headlines about the Magnificent Seven tech stocks and the AI revolution, it’s easy to forget the much larger world quietly humming along in every town, the pizza shops, the ice cream counters, the local retailers, the hardworking men and women grinding away at their own entrepreneurial ventures, hoping to reach that magical million-dollar revenue mark that deserves far more respect than it gets. Only 9% of U.S. small businesses have revenues exceeding $1mm.
I want my sons to stand on that side of the counter for a summer or more. To feel what it takes to put quality food on the table, keep products neatly on the shelf, and deliver service consistently to finicky customers day after day.
The perspective gained from working a job versus reading case studies in the classroom will help my sons learn about work ethic, customer service, and what it takes to really run a small business that may be fortunate to meet the million-dollar milestone. This will be more valuable to them when it comes time to analyze larger-scale business models, factories, and global opportunities in our fast-changing world. They will become more insightful investors because they’ll actually understand how the real world works, one shift at a time.
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Ron Speaker
Financial Consigliere
Midlife Male Contributor
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