honey came out kind of dark. Getting stung by bees, and not producing the greatest honey….It was time to focus on my computer stuff.
8th-11th Grade
Pritchett as high school businessman (photo courtesy of Pritchett family).
BOB PRITCHETT DESCRIBES HIS BUSINESSES AS A KID Age 6 Badge a Minute…a little press that made little metal pin badges. My dad set me up with that. I sold badges to friends, and literally from a table on the street. This was what was great about my dad. You could buy all the designs from Badge-a-Minute and make the stock badges, and sell them for a buck, or whatever it was. But dad had a friend who had his own photo typesetting machine. So we’d go over to his house and make custom badges. It wasn’t much of a business, but my first time of getting out there. As kids, we also sold the excess vegetables from my mom’s vegetable garden. My younger brother Dan and I would take a push cart around the neighborhood.
Age 10 We got beehives and set them up in our suburban back yard. That started my little business, Bob’s Honey. A guy in our church was a beekeeper…and he told me how it works, how to get started, the way to work with bees, and he sold us the equipment. Then he said, “The bees have to establish their hives, so you can’t start selling honey in the first year. But I can sell you this 60-pound drum of honey from our hives that you can start selling until 16 | BUSINESSPULSE.COM
you can harvest yours.” So I bought this bucket of honey, and bought funky jars, and typed labels on a little typewriter, and bottled this honey, and sold it. To friends, people at church, or standing on our street, Pawtucket, selling to cars driving by. It was never a huge business, but I sold enough to learn how to build spreadsheets for business. I had sales records, knew which size of things sold better, how the market was – squeeze bottles vs. in jars. I would issue performance reports. I was kind of a geeky kid. The bees were when I first started to really think about business concepts. Worrying about margin, and profit. I learned a lot from that. I made, I’d say, over 500 bucks, which was significant money for a kid. This was 1981 and I was 10 years old in the fifth grade. Margins were good, about 100 percent. While I waited for my hive to be ready I bought wholesale local clover and wild honey from Maine. The imported honey was my runaway best-seller, and I charged a premium price for it. When I went back to resupply, the guy had too many problems with bears knocking over the hives, and he decided to cut back and not harvest. I shut down, because the clover wasn’t distinctive enough from what you could get at the store. His wild raspberry was what people liked. People would buy honey once from a 10-year-old, but wild raspberry is what people would come back for. Finally, by the way, we did harvest the hive, and the honey was terrible. We lived in a suburban area (Cherry Hills, N.J.) near woods, and there was a soybean field behind us. The
I had my own software company, New Dimension Software, in high school. I sold a set of software tools called “C Spot Run” to other programmers and software developers. It was software tools for people who programmed in the “C” language, and I posted them on computer bulletin boards as a newsletter for my product as a “C” add-on library. Actually I started working on it in eighth grade, and then sold it all through high school. I was only in high school three years, then I took it to college at Drexel. I didn’t do much work on it once I got to college.
and I like to think we did a better job than others and that’s why we’re successful. Dozens of electronic Bible studies exist; it’s kind of a passion project. A lot have been created by day programmers who worked on developing their own at night, like we did to start. A lot of them aren’t serious competitors, they haven’t quit their day job yet. Some are in it for passion, or for fun, or whatever. Others, like us, have offices and employees.
On having downtown locales Having people working downtown is good for downtown. I wish that more businesses chose to be downtown because I think there’s a network effect. It doesn’t just add those bodies, it adds their interactions with restaurants and shops. We certainly had the option to be in an office building on the outskirts, but we wanted to be where you can walk out the door and be part of a community. Some offices are outposts, self-contained with a lunch room or cafeteria, people drive to the building and