How To Become A Vegan Entrepreneur

By Patrick Steptoe

Want to be an Entrepreneur? Learn how to overcome challenges, life's obstacles and even yourself in this true life story from a successful food & beverage industry  enntrepreneur. Written from "Real" Life experiences and includes copies of actual supplier agreements and business plans to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. This book is a "How To" for anyone who is thinking about becoming an entrpreneur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: STEPTOE
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386777243

Patrick Steptoe

Born in St.Louis and raised in the rough downton projects to become a All-Star basketball player who later attended the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff on a basketball scholarship. After receiving a family recipe from his Grandmother Sue Brown, he started his first lemonade business in his dormroom bathtub hustling to pay his school tuition. From these humble entrpreneurial beginnings Patrick went on to sell lemonade and vegan foods to major companies Kroger, Royal Caribbean, Compass Food Group, Harris Teeter and Sysco Foods.  Through his unique and extensive knowledge only learned by the failures of being an entrepreneur, he decided to give back and tell his story in hopes that what he has learned will help the next batch of entrepreneurs achive their dreams.  Patrick believes that only through failure can one gain the proper insights to succeed. Everyday above ground is a gift! Continued Success...

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title 

WHO AM I?

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri in a very rough neighborhood, but my saving grace was that I could play basketball and talk shit with the best of them. I was the typical jock with thoughts that my life would be full of women and riches once I made it to the NBA. I ate pancakes for dinner many times because we were poor, and my Mom raised four kids with no Father. I realized early that a talent like basketball could help bring food home to my family, help get new tennis shoes and help get women to do a variety of things for me. The neighborhood was rough, filled with drug use, killings and gang activity. I was often challenged by the local thugs because I was tall and skinny with the whole light skinned thing happening. But I was tough, not just on the outside, I was tough in my heart and I wasn’t a follower. I said we were poor, but I need to expound on that more.

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We didn’t have money for frivolous things most families could afford, but we had a decent life. I credit my Mom for being strong enough to not go get food stamps and make do with what we had. Sometimes that meant government subsidized peanut butter or dented Railroad Salvage cans of green beans, but we had to become creative to survive. I also give my Mom credit for educating us at the dinner table every night with flash cards on a variety of subjects like history, math, black history, psychology, sociology and music. It wasn’t your typical inner-city household dinner. In fact, the home education from my Mom rally allowed me to excel in school because the public-school education was not preparing me for what the world had in store for me. I also wasn’t applying myself in class over what was required for me to maintain my basketball eligibility.

I went to McKinley High School on the southside of St. Louis. McKinley is famous for producing the Hall of Fame NBA player JoJo White. I played with some very talented teammates and a couple even made it to the NBA. Roland Grey and Monroe Douglass were standouts and got drafted by the Detroit Pistons. In fact, I was part of the team that won the first Missouri State 3A High School Basketball Championship in McKinley’s eighty-year history. St. Louis was and still is a breeding ground for sports talent. I played against former New York Knicks NBA player Anthony Bonner and even today there are many guys from St. Louis in the NBA like Bradley Beal and Jayson Tatum with the Boston Celtics. 

Winning the State Championship at McKinley was the first true time I saw how people treated you differently when you were a winner, or you were famous even on a local level. I didn’t go to class for about a month after we won the state and I still passed every class. I began to get money from different sources, attended adult parties for free, had rental cars with no charges and increased my female groupie count by at least ten. I felt good being able to bring groceries home and give my Mom some help. My confidence started to really grow with my notoriety.  But as my name grew around St. Louis, I was constantly asked if I was related to Gina Steptoe or Michelle Steptoe? I had no idea who these people were and I finally asked my Mom if we had other relatives in St. Louis that I didn’t know about. Come to find out, My father Robert Steptoe had been living twenty miles from me my whole life. He had left my Mom and started a new family in the suburbs or in the county as St.Louisians would say. While we struggled eating pancakes for dinner and occasionally having the lights cut off from lack of payments, my father and his family lived in a large nice house out in the county. He sent his daughters to plush county schools and they enjoyed the finest things life could offer. I was surprised to find this out and knew this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was becoming a well-known basketball star around St. Louis and for some reason I got the idea in my head that my father would want to meet this basketball star of a son, he hadn’t seen or spoken to. I was sixteen, six foot two and maybe a buck and a quarter aka I weight one hundred and twenty-five pounds soaking wet....

I talked with my Mom about my plans and she gave me as much information as she had about Mr. Robert Steptoe. He was the General Manager for Walgreen’s stores in the Hazelwood, Missouri area. I figured that would be easy for me to find him given there were only five or six Walgreen’s in the Hazelwood area. I borrowed one of my girlfriend’s cars and asked my friend Rollo to ride with me out Hazelwood. I was excited to finally meet my father! Rollo and I talked about the situation as we rode the thirty minutes or so out to the county. We hit up three Walgreen’s location without any luck. On the fourth store, we struck gold. I asked for Mr. Steptoe at the front counter and the lady pointed us to the rear of the store. As I searched isle to isle, I suddenly saw a man who looked like a taller, older version of myself. If it wasn’t for the grey hair, we were almost identical.

My boy Rollo was looking crazy with his mouth opened when he spotted Mr. Steptoe. He pointed at him saying, Damn, Step he looks just like you!

I shot a look at him, then told him to get it together before we walked down the end of the isle. Mr. Steptoe, I said nervously. He turned around and looked at me with the strangest stare I have ever experienced then and now. He paused and acknowledged he was Robert Steptoe. Excitedly, I said, Hi I’m Patrick Steptoe. I’m your Son! There was a long silence, matter of fact it was a really awkward pause. Mr. Steptoe looked me straight in my face and said, Sorry, but I don’t have a Son. I felt my feet stiffen up and I couldn’t move. I felt my thoughts racing as I looked over at Rollo. I think Rollo felt as embarrassed as I did because he had his hands covering his face and was looking down at the ground.   

This was a really strange feeling to meet my father and then be denied my very existence. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my driver’s license. I said, see here it says Patrick Steptoe?" I think that made the situation worse because Mr. Steptoe looked me square in my eyes and said, Son I don’t know what to tell you but I don’t have a son. Man, I was crushed as I stood my stupid ass in the aisle of Walgreen’s tripping on how my father just dissed me in front of Rollo! The ride back to the city was serial and very quiet. There wasn’t much that needed to be said other than what had just happened in Walgreen’s earlier. That incident with my father would mark me for the rest of my life. In fact, I contribute that rejection to why I acted in immature ways or overindulging ways either with women or drugs or at times just acting a straight ass...

I had to develop a overconfident attitude about life and that attitude carried over into every other aspect of my life including relationships. I had my first and only child when I sixteen years old. My grandmother told me learn to not rob the liquor store without a ski mask! Don’t be stupid and have sex with all these silly girls without a condom. Throughout the years I’ve tried to follow Nan’s advice and gratefully the few times I’ve slipped up, I didn’t get caught. I was dating a girl named Leslie, who happened to be the first white girl I had ever dated. This was a result of me making a conscious decision not to date any of the girls in the projects because I witnessed the same stories over and over. A guy on his way out the ghetto via sports has a baby, then has a baby with another girl and before you know it he is three or four kids down working at a factory trying to cover his child support. A dream deferred or more like cancelled.

Even though I was dating Leslie, we had an unspoken agreement that I was also dating other girls when I chose. Leslie was twenty years old and had graduated from McKinley a few years ahead of me. She always hung out with a girl named Shelly, who by a crazy turn of events would become my child’s mother. We didn’t have much in the manner of amenities living in the projects and I would find any reason I could to be somewhere else when I wasn’t traveling playing basketball. Leslie and her Mom were the first real cool white people I had hung around. They also were compared to how I lived, the closest people I had been exposed to who had some money. They lived in a swanky downtown apartment in a place called The Mansion House. The place was Disney World compared to our project apartment. It was equipped with three bathrooms with showers, a jacuzzi tub and a swimming pool on the roof. I would often stay there overnight or sometimes when Leslie and her Mom were out of town. One night after partying with the guys, I went over and stayed the weekend while Leslie and her Mom where traveling. I was in a drunken sleep and I was suddenly awaking by someone giving me head under the covers. I naturally thought it was Leslie, but boy was I wrong. When I lifted the covers, it was her friend Shelly looking up at me and smiling. She was buck naked and honestly, I never knew how fine she was because she always wore baggy clothes. The head continued, which I enjoyed and then we had sex. Days passed and I gave it no thought and I continued to see Leslie. A couple of weeks later, I get a call from Shelly telling me that she’s pregnant. Now I’m sixteen in high school about to be a father. Needless to say, the whole conversation of me marrying a twenty-year old woman and still pursuing a basketball career was out of the question. I was in asshole mode and things didn’t go well we me and Shelly, but I can say thanks to my family who served as surrogates I have a decent relationship with my daughter. Shelly and I don’t speak, and I accept full responsibility for my actions. If I could apologize, I would.

In summer of nineteen eight six, I graduated from high school and I had a few scholarships offers from some small to medium colleges throughout the Midwest. I was disappointed because I honestly believed that my basketball skills would get me a decent look from a division one university. I thought about my options and decided to go to junior college instead. So I accepted a two year ride from Meramec Community College in Kirkwood, Missouri about thirty minute drive from the house.

When I got to Meramec it was the first time I was around so many white people. It was a shell shock and I decided to take full advantage of the situation as a local basketball star. I soon realized that whether in the hood or around white people the same rules applied to people who were rich or basketball stars. I was voted the top conference player my first year and led the team in scoring. I also led the team in partying, smoking weed and bedding the Meramec female student body. My first threesome happened strange enough with my teammate’s girlfriend one day after practice. Mark Jones aka Stretch offered to give me a ride home. His girlfriend picked us