Bootstrapped To $1 Mil In 1 Year By Selling Tires?

From the transcript: Lou: We basically had a group of cheapskates that were buying tires from a bike shop in the U.K. And then one day we got a box of tires that were the wrong color and when I went to the post office to send them back to England the guy wanted $50 to ship the box. I said to myself, “There’s got to be a better way.” So I handed the box of tires to my 12 year old son and I said, “Nate, sell these on eBay and I have $300 tied up in the box. You can keep anything you make above that.” And that was almost ten years ago. He sold the box of ten, eventually, for $350, made $50, he was 12 years old at the time, and said, “Dad, next time you’re ordering tires, order me ten more too.” And said, “All right.’

So then 20 tires became 50, became 100, became 500, and eventually we had 18 wheelers pulling up into our driveway dropping off pallets of bicycle tires. And my two kids at the time by then were 13 and 11, they shipped 10,000 orders from the parking space in my garage, a million dollars worth of product in the first year.

Andrew: So, this sounds like such a beautiful story, I’m wondering if, well, was it just that simple or was there maybe an intention to sell this . . . well, you tell me. I see that smiling, there’s some recognition in what I’m saying.

Lou: I think there was a point at which my wife and I had a conversation about my use of child labor in doing order fulfillment and she felt like maybe we should scale the growth back a bit, it was getting a bit out of control. And as an entrepreneur that was just not something I could relate to. It’s like, “Hey, if people want to buy the product and we can buy it and we can sell it at a profit, we have to do more.’

So we eventually got to the point where my wife walked into the garage one morning at about 7:00 a.m. and my 11 year old was in tears. And when she asked him what was the problem he, in tears, said, “We’re not going to be able to ship all the orders before we have to leave for school.” And she walked into the house and said, “This has got to get out of the garage.” And so we eventually moved the inventory up to Portland, Oregon. We were in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, at the time and we moved the business up to Portland, Oregon. There was no sales tax in Oregon. We reincorporated and started doing business out of Portland.