This is the compelling story of how a young entrepreneur with bold vision and relentless energy tackled insurmountable odds and went on to.... Well, how the story ends is not as important as the story itself. I shall attempt to tell it as best as I can, though I doubt I can do the drama of what transpired justice. Note that, to protect the privacy of the persons involved, names have been changed and geographic specifics have been left out. Let me first just give you some quick background about David Wong. As much as I hate to generalize, there are two ethnic groups that excel at commerce, and these are the Jews and the Chinese. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that David was born into the world endowed with a prodigious capacity for entrepreneurship, as his mother was of solid Jewish stock from Russia, whereas his father was a first-generation immigrant from Sichuan province. You could say that it was David's destiny to be an entrepreneur.
Like many other natural-born entrepreneurs, David had a paper route and a lemonade stand by the age of nine, and a thriving sports memorabilia trading business by the time he was fourteen. At the age of 17, David had already amassed a minor fortune which he used to pay cash for a brand-new Toyota pickup. He knew that success has to be shown to breed more success. He had many friends, and despite an inability to talk about anything other than business, experienced no major difficulties getting dates.
It was on an awkward date at the largest mall in town that the epiphany took place. The setting is a city in the Midwest, not quite as large as Omaha but large enough for you to have heard about. David and his date were eating a pizza across an ice cream parlor, and had run out of things to say to each other. She was one of the prettiest girls in the school, he the most eligible male not on the football team, but despite their mutual desire to hook up it was obvious the chemistry wasn't right.
The girl was gamely feigning interest while David rambled on about his favorite subject, opportunities in life, when David noticed something on the sign of the ice cream parlor. It said, "The freshest shakes from the freshest milk." (I was recently in town, and I can confirm that both the pizza joint and the ice cream parlor, with the slogan, still exist. As then, the ice cream parlor was packed with teens, parents with kids, and even a few oldtimers.)
David took this claim to be something of a personal challenge. And he had is lightbulb moment.
Entrepreneurs are good at running businesses effectively, paying close attention to the bottom line. But the day-to-day management of enterprises is, in fact, exceedingly boring. No surprise then, that many entrepreneurs are secretly obsessed with bold, visionary ideas that make a big splash and change business history forever.
David was no exception. He had his pickup, but he really wanted a Mercedes-Benz. For that, he was convinced, he needed a store, preferrably in a mall. David knew he could raise enough money from assorted relatives to open a store. But he wasn't sure what type of store to open, and he didn't have any bold, visionary ideas that would guarantee the store would be a success. There were classes to attend and schoolwork to do, so David couldn't man the store and fine-tune it by trial and error. He needed something dramatic and exciting to drive sales even if the owner was absent.
David had been waiting for an epiphany, and when he saw the sign about fresh shakes, he got it.
To his credit he didn't start blabbing about it to his date. He didn't say, Hey, see that sign? Wouldn't it be cool if someone came along and showed them what real freshness is all about?
Instead he said nothing, and allowed the idea to grow in his mind. Throughout the movie they later watched, he paid scant attention to the screen and to his date, and the idea continued to unfold, growing increasingly sophisticated. By the time David dropped his date off at her home he had a 12-page business plan fully mapped out in his mind. He was excited, far more so than he had been about the date.
The kernel of the idea was to set up an ice cream parlor with a live cow in an enclosure, which would produce the freshest possible milk for the freshest possible shakes. Patrons would not just see the cow, but also feed it, and, if they so chose, milk it themselves. The cow was a sensational gimmick to get David's parlor into the news media, garner masses of attention and free publicity, as well as to provide a focal point of interest in the mall. Bored mallgoers would flock to the parlor just to see the live cow, and many of them would end up buying a shake, or ice cream, or a cheese crepe (David decided that it would be inappropriate to offer burgers within sniffing distance of a fellow bovine.)
It would be quite a challenge. A lone cow would run out of milk, so David would need a rotating mini-herd of about five cows. Sophisticated equipment would have to be installed to dispose of the dung without leaving any smell - after all, the venue was in a mall, and a restaurant at that. Valuable floor space would have to be apportioned for the storage of feeds. And something would have to be done to ensure the cow was taken care of at night, because you can't just turn a cow off as you can kitchen equipment.
The next five weeks were a feverish blur of activity for David. He prevailed on a geek friend to develop from scratch an automated cow-dung capture and packaging machine. He inked an agreement to rent cows from a small-scale organic farmer, and figured out a way to shuttle the cows from pasture to mall. And most surprisingly of all, he convinced the management of a mid-size upscale mall to accept his application for floor space. It helped that the daughter of one of the board members attended David's high school, and David invested in a presentation involving realistic 3D computer graphics (which were expensive and not as common back then).
The parlor was be situated at ground level, and a hole was knocked into the wall. A passageway was built connecting the shop floor to the parking area, allowing the cows to be brought in and out without having to pass through the entrances intended for human mallgoers. David decided not to keep the cows overnight, and hired a Guatemalan driver who was to be in charge of shuttling the cows back to their barn. This was an added expense so David skimped on service staff. The customers, he reasoned, would be more than willing to feed the cow and keep it happy.
To teach the customers to milk the cow, and take over if they balked, a retired farmer, an immigrant from Russia, was hired at the minimum wage. David found the minimum wage to be excessively high, so he charged the farmer fees for his locker and his meals. The idea was to trim overhead to a minimum and recoup the investment within 18 months, and then start franchising nationwide.
David had borrowed heavily from family to help finance the parlor. The store had cost a massive amount of money to decorate, and getting the custom machinery up and running drained David's personal expenses. He had no money left for advertising or marketing. But David wasn't worried. Having worked closely with all three local network affiliates to ensure the news crews would show up on opening day, he knew he would get plenty of free coverage.
On the big day, David woke up excited. He had barely slept, having spent all of last night rehearsing his interview with Larry King. It was just a matter of time before CNN called up. Would it be during the first week, or later on when the business was already chugging along nicely? The spotlight was coming, and David was determined to be ready for it. David put on his lucky red shirt. Feeling slightly giddy, even breathless, he got into his pickup and drove to the mall.
It was the morning of September 11, 2001.
As David was parking his pickup, Pamela, the coordinator from the CBS affiliate, called. Something big was flooding the airwaves, and they had to cancel. David shrugged. One news crew less wasn't a big deal.
The other crews didn't even have the courtesy to call. There was no room in the media for anything other than the attack on New York and the war the country had found itself in. The ice cream parlor got no publicity on opening day, and two days later the passageway from the parking lot was shut down by the mall's security division.
David knew that if he tried he could get the passageway reopened, but that it would be a futile effort. America was at war and people just weren't interested in a cow at a mall. Having invested his entire savings, David was virtually broke, and it would be a struggle to keep the business going without immediate cashflow. And the cash wasn't likely to flow given that publicity had been zero. The writing was on the wall. Just seven days after opening day, David paid his employees and shut down the parlor.
His energy now dissipated, David's grades tumbled. After graduating, under pressure from his parents, David began working the swing shift for relatives in the restaurant business. The work was tedious and David started sniffing meth to make it easier. Before long he was addicted, and, like all meth addicts, started stealing to fuel his habit. Two weeks later he was caught, literally with his hand in the till. The police weren't called, since David was family, but he was asked not to come back.
Six months later his mother found David hanging from the rafters of his attic bedroom.
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Contributor's Note
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