I want you to think back to your first job. Maybe you were helping one of your parents. Maybe you wore a cheap polyester uniform to a fast food franchise.
Whatever it was, I’d be willing to bet that there were things – probably many things – that were kind of awful. But those early jobs aren’t about enjoying the good life; they’re about building skills, and sometimes that skill is resilience.
My first job was delivering newspapers. I got an early morning route with the Vancouver Province, when my best friend’s older brother handed it down to me in ninth grade. Every morning, for most of the year in the pitch black of 5am, I’d ride my bicycle to the box to collect the papers. I did this six days a week, rain or shine, until I handed the route down to my brother when he reached ninth grade and I stepped up in life to the glorious world of washing dishes at a golf course.
Now, there’s no real way for me to explain this without dating myself, so I’ll just go full on back in my day on this one. Back in those days, there was no subscription via credit card, or anything like that. I mean, we’re talking about a time and place when actual, physical newspapers were delivered to your doorstep.
The way the system worked was that I effectively bought the papers from the paper company at a discount, and collected from each household individually. The delta was my profit for the month.
So in addition to rising before dawn six days a week, I also had to go get the money. I would slip a notice inside the front page – usually I did this in the Sunday edition since that had the most subscriptions and everybody read it. Most of the time I would get an envelope out the next day, under the welcome mat or some other nondescript place, with a cheque or sometimes cash. In December, I almost always got a nice tip, although a couple of magnificent customers would leave a tip every month.
If somebody did not give me the money, I then had to go collecting. This would typically be after school, or after dinner when I was sure that people would be home. Also after dinner, I’d sometimes be able to get a parent to drive me around the route, to make it less of a chore.
Usually people just forgot, or missed the notice, so they paid when I knocked on the door. But every single month, there were people who just didn’t pay.
So I’d be standing there, a 12-year-old kid, on some person’s doorstep after providing them a service six days a week for the last month, and they would be inside, pretending they didn’t hear the doorbell.
And I knew it, too.
I could tell because of how silent everything got the second I rang the bill. It was like how a jungle gets silent when a tiger walks through. Tigers probably don’t even know that animals make sounds, because they’ve never heard them before.
At 12 years old, looking for twenty bucks or whatever it was, I imagined I was pretty far down the list of predators creditors that they were scared of. But they were dodging me like rich kids dodge the draft. My dad would come over and knock, too, but if someone didn’t want to pay, they weren’t answering.
I’d get stiffed by someone almost every month. Their paper would get canceled, and sometimes they’d pay up to get their service restored. Other times, nothing. I just wouldn’t get paid.
But that first job taught me, right down to the core of my being, is that you deserve to get paid for the work you do. And sometimes, you have to work hard on the job, and then work hard again to get paid. Because some people are just like that. They’ll delay, make excuses, or hide like a rabbit in a forest full of tigers.
Getting paid should be the easiest part of doing business. If 12 year old me had Benji Pays, every single household would have been on autopay. No autopay, no newspaper. And in those days, that meant no boxscores, stock tickers or opinion columns either.
And you’d better believe I’d be surcharging for those credit cards, too.
There’s no way I’d be working evenings and weekends chasing down people for money they owed me, getting stiffed by someone every month, and I wouldn’t be counting bills and sending cheques to be processed. None of that.
I wouldn’t do that for my paper route, and I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t be doing it for a business doing $5 million in revenue.
If you do the work, you deserve to get paid.
Getting paid should be the easiest part of doing work.
First lesson I learned on the job.
