Andrew LockBesides, he was never one to blindly “ follow the crowd” and he knew he
could do better, regardless of his young age and inexperience.
One day while traveling on a bus, he overheard some old people
complain to each other about not being able to carry bags of potatoes
home from the store, and that sparked an idea to create a potato route.
Andrew found a farm that was willing to supply sacks of potatoes
and h ad his parents drive him over to collect them. He then divided the
potatoes into small “retail” bags and went from door to door, quickly
establishing a little business that earned him eighteen to twenty times
more than his school friends were making with their paper routes, and
he was able to do it after school, not at 5 AM in the freezing cold of the
British winters.
Andrew comments, “I had no interest in potatoes, but the money
was hard to pass by. Actually, I got a lot of satisfaction from helping so
many people who couldn’t g et out of the house. They really appreciated
the service and would frequently pay me more than the asking price. I
realized at that point that within reason, price sometimes isn’t an
issue. If demand is high and there’s no competition, price is often taken
out of the equation. That was one of my earliest marketing lessons at a
time when I didn’t even know what marketing was!”
School and Beyond
Understandably, at school, Andrew was know n by everyone as “the
entrepreneur,” and quickly won all the t op awards for business studies.
Andrew’s first i nfo-product was created at age fourteen. It was a
guidebook about planning a vacation to Florida theme parks. “This was
before desk-top publishing. so I used a typewriter to create the guide,
and photocopied it to make copies to sell. By today’s standards they
looked horrible, but again it taught me that if the information was
good, people would overlook presentation.”
Deciding to forgo college and instead focus on real-world business,
Andrew’s hobby in entertainment magic led him to hook up with
famous entertainer Paul Daniels. Daniels is known as the Johnny
Carson of the UK. He is someone who’s performed more magic on
te levision than anyone in history. Andr ew and Paul created the
definitive course about how to profit from performing magic tricks for