A PATH DEFINED

By ED LEMCO and VELMA LEMCO MARSHALL

The memoir of a high-school dropout from an impoverished immigrant family who rose from peddling magazine subscriptions at the age of 15 to raising over $100 million dollars to acquire a European chain of motorcycle dealerships. During the years between he became a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army; a family man with th

• Language: English
• Publisher: BURNT SAGE PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781734143713

Book preview

FOREWARD

The road you travel is defined by your own experiences.

With retirement approaching I look back in wonder at the events that brought me to this point. I was a sales manager at age 22, a general manager at 24, and a district manager at 25. Since then I’ve launched a dozen enterprises, some of which are still viable entities that continue to generate an income stream for me and my associates.

I started a retail business when I was 27 years old with no more assets than a wife, three daughters, an appropriately named dog we called Ugly, and a pickup truck of which the bank owned a much larger percentage than we did. Before I sold Motorcycle Mall, at age 36, I had become one of the largest retailers in the motorcycle industry, Chairman of the National Motorcycle Dealers Association, operator of two automobile dealerships, and a leader in the community.

Using the money from the sale of the retail business, I launched an advertising agency. It was to become a consulting enterprise that changed the way an entire industry did business.

In 1988 I charged off to, of all places, Poland; met with a head of state, and summoned manufacturers from around the globe. Had anything but my giant ego been driving the whole flamboyant trip I might have realized sooner rather than later that the enterprise was not only a bad idea, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It netted me a few great memories, a lasting admiration for a group of really sturdy folks, some valuable lessons in human nature, and a near bankruptcy. But what a wild ride it was.

I’ve been ushered into unbelievably luxurious suites in the financial communities of New York, Boston, and London where I was able to raise over $100 million dollars (U.S.) to acquire and expand a European chain of motorcycle dealerships. I stayed with that as Chief Executive Officer and learned first-hand how severe and demanding public funding can be.

All of this, and more, was achieved by a high school dropout who joined the army on his seventeenth birthday, married a month before turning nineteen, and had a child before turning twenty.

How did these things happen? How did they begin? What drove a penniless uneducated kid from a poor family in The Bronx to make it?

The path that came to define me was unique, of course. Each of us has different experiences and we react differently to those experiences that might be similar. Additionally, my path led me to a small and limited industry that was on the threshold of great growth and was in need of a leader. Had someone else stepped forward, the direction of that growth would have been very different—as would the course of my own road. Yet, I believe the lessons I learned can be applied to any business and can be implemented by any individual driven to find a higher path.

Some people are certainly dealt an easier hand than I was, but an easy hand is far from a guarantee of success. That better hand is often loaded with distractions—the velvet handcuffs of a livable wage and a good retirement plan create the illusion of comfort and stability. However, I started with nothing so had nothing to lose.

At each step along a path the trekker must make a decision. Can one accept this place, be content with this latest gain? Should he risk what has been gained to move higher? How much risk? How much higher?

Making business-success a priority comes at a price. There will be less time for family and personal pursuits. There will be more physical stress and emotional anguish. With each successful step there will be more to lose on the next roll of the dice—the risk will be greater and the decisions weightier. Only the trekker can say, in the end, if the path defined was worth the trek. I wish you good luck in finding and defining your own path.

THE EARLY PATH

Entrepreneur: n. a person who undertakes an enterprise.

It requires much more than this narrow definition to describe an individual who has the drive and the vision to bring about a successful enterprise; an individual, often without a conventional education, who sees an opportunity and can grasp the strategy to capitalize on it; an individual with the attitude, courage, and wit to improvise a substitute for whatever tools or resources he may lack. Entrepreneurs are present at all levels of society. Just as Rockefeller was an entrepreneur, so too is the street merchant in a third world country. Each mustered the resources available to him and undertook an enterprise.

There is a level of glibness in an entrepreneur. The ability to quickly process information, then formulate thoughts and verbalize them succinctly is common to them and present in all top sales people—the most enterprising of entrepreneurs. The trait is not the product of breeding or upbringing but cultivated from an inherent ability with which all of us are born, but which not every one nurtures.

Small children possess the ability to sense what it takes to capture the attention of one individual or a room full of them—to adjust their persona to their audience. We have all seen how quickly their personalities change as they move through a family gathering; brash with the teenagers one minute, bashful with the grandparents the next. At an early age the most confident of those children—a very small percentage—begin to refine that ability. They are captivated by their artistry and are driven to feed upon it.

Some will learn discipline along with that persuasiveness and go on to seek and develop other skills. They’ll channel their energies towards a specific goal and become performers within a defined field, emerging as actors, musicians, lawyers, or politicians. There are those, however, who fail to develop that kind of discipline. They neither pursue nor benefit from structured learning or training opportunities. They find themselves depending on their loquacity. When this individual is blessed with a fairly high IQ and a prodigious memory, he has the making of an entrepreneur—first and foremost a salesman driven to keep people’s attention and control the room.

Glibness can get you a few steps toward your goal, but only as far as the door. Cognizance, when matched with glibness, is what makes a truly dynamic entrepreneur. The successful street merchant harnesses a limited range of resources. A broader awareness of available resources, particularly financial ones, will enable that entrepreneur to effect a much larger and more lucrative enterprise. That same glibness and chutzpah used by children works as well (perhaps better) with a high-level audience.

If I have a regret at age 64, it is that it took me so long to really understand how the financial community works and how to get the attention of my bankers. It didn’t take more work to bring off a major project than a smaller one. It did, however, require an understanding of how business funding works.

§

The economic climate in the early 1950s in the United States was cold and barren. But later in that decade the American public discovered the stock market and, hopeful of making a killing, dumped billions of dollars on Wall Street in support of one entrepreneurial scheme or another. Many of those offerings were poorly planned ventures with no more promise than, I want to start a business that I think will make money, and damned few are viable today. People lost their investment dollars, their savings, even their homes. With the hope of helping people decide where to invest, dozens of public institutions and nearly as many governmental agencies conducted surveys of the new business ventures in an effort to typify an entrepreneur.

Through the years we have all read at least some of the results of those studies and surveys. While those same studies, conducted more recently, reflect a change in the gender and education categories, many of the traits remain the same today. Those old surveys concluded that an entrepreneur:

• is a first-born male (in the early studies, less than one percent of those considered to be entrepreneurs were women though in the 1980s that percentage had jumped to about 10%);

• is a child of first or second generation immigrants;

• shows early signs of assertiveness and individuality;

• has a high level of energy (but is perhaps a bit lazy, finding it more profitable to get someone else to do the work part of a plan);

• is a born optimist (so much so that his perspective easily becomes unrealistic);

• has a strong father-figure (though that relationship was probably strained or competitive);

• has a lower education-base than his counterparts (a large corporation tends to hire people with college degrees, assimilating them into the corporate body with offerings of security and stability);

• marries early (just as the corporation offers security and stability in a man’s career, a wife offers continuity and stability in his home life);

• starts his first high-stakes, high-dollar venture in his late twenties or early thirties.

I was all of those things.

§

A war baby, I was born in Sydney to a lively young Australian woman and a lonely G.I. from The Bronx. I was still a babe-in-arms when, along with a whole boatload of war brides, my mother took me to San Francisco. From there we traveled by rail to New York City. At Grand Central Station my mother and I met Pop, my father’s father, for the first time.

Dad and Pop met our train. Mom was carrying me on her back in a carrier that made me invisible to anyone my mother was facing so Pop’s greeting when seeing her was, You can just go back home if you haven’t brought the baby.

The Army had paid for her train ticket but provided nothing in the way of a food allowance. Food on the train was expensive and Mom had no money. She hadn’t eaten since leaving San Francisco. They took us home—a fifth-floor walk-up in a five-story building at 2473 Davidson Avenue. It was just off the intersection of Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue in The Bronx. Caught up in the excitement of the arrival of the first grandson, no one thought to offer Mom anything to eat until late that evening. (She recalls that day with contempt even now.) We would share this apartment with