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How To Be A Serial Entrepreneur

Written by: James Chan

Article Overview: Marvin Schwam knew how to create magic. He gave people desire.

How To Be A Serial Entrepreneur

Marvin Schwam is a serial entrepreneur. He seems to have a new business about as often as some other people have a new suit. He has found many different ways to turn his artistic talents into products. Most, though not all, have worked. He has succeeded often enough that he is able to take the occasional failure in stride and move on to the next idea.

~{!0~}The thought of going to work for someone else always terrifies me,~{!1~} Marvin says. ~{!0~}It has always been difficult for me to obey other people. Besides, I want to reap the rewards of my own risk taking.~{!1~}
He first went into business for himself at the age of 10. That~{!/~}s when his art teacher told him that he had a talent for making and painting ceramics. She let him use her kiln to fire them. It was his idea to sell them.

Most of Marvin~{!/~}s businesses have been animated by his desire to express his artistic creativity, combined with a knack for identifying opportunities and a willingness to take risks. In a series of businesses he has founded since childhood, he has been able to realize his artistic ideas on a large scale. And he has been able to make them pay. ~{!0~}I am very good at making things that nobody needs, but many people want,~{!1~} he says.

Marvin~{!/~}s first real business began when he was in high school. He made artificial flower arrangements, which he was able to have displayed in a local beauty salon, where they could be admired at length by the patrons. He was able to sell the arrangements first to the ladies under the hair dryers, and then to others. Soon, he found that he was making more money from this hobby than his father was earning from his job as a hardware salesman.

But Marvin realized that making floral arrangements for sale was a business with limited growth. He needed a way to profit from his talents on a larger scale. He knocked on the door of a company that imported artificial flowers and distributed hundreds of thousands of catalogues. He volunteered to go to the importer~{!/~}s factory two days a week without pay and create arrangements from the current selection of flowers and foliage. The importer would take pictures of his creations and pay a 2 percent commission on sales his arrangements generated.

At the age of 18, Marvin was earning as much as $2000 for each day of work he did, which was a very substantial amount four decades ago, and pretty impressive even today. This success gave Marvin confidence. ~{!0~}With my talents and creative abilities, I knew I could always find a way to make money.~{!1~}
Even so, after he graduated from college and was married, he felt that a man with a family to support ought to have a full-time job. He worked for a New York advertising agency for a couple of years but, dissatisfied, returned to artificial flowers. He worked briefly for a company that sold artificial arrangements for office building lobbies then, after that business was sold, started his own similar firm in 1968.

Marvin was able to place an elaborate indoor landscape in the lobby of a large office building, along with a sign advertising his company. An architect whose firm was in the building noticed it and got in touch with him. The firm was designing one of the first indoor regional shopping malls and needed to find something to enliven the interior. The mall had four wings, and the architect wondered if Marvin could design an indoor landscape based on the four seasons, featuring 60-foot trees. These would be ten times as tall as most artificial trees, four times as high as the biggest.

Only God can make a tree, the poem goes, but Marvin, ever the entrepreneur, decided to take a shot. He rented a loft and hired artisans, and delivered the design and the trees. The architects, the mall developers, and the shoppers all approved.

Marvin realized that the shopping mall was a new environment, and he had been the first to figure out how to decorate it. In 1970, he displayed his work and his successful project at a national shopping mall convention, and booked business from nine other malls. The following year, his firm did displays for 47 malls.

In 1981, Marvin came across a company that made mechanical Santa Clauses for display in department stores. The owner wanted to sell, and Marvin had an idea.

He bought the company, and scaled down the size and costumes of the animated figures from six feet to two. That way people could buy them for their own homes. He moved production to Taiwan to reduce the cost of making the figures, and suddenly what had been an item selling to only a handful of customers became a consumer product. In 1983, he sold $24 million worth of domestic-sized animated Santas, and the business was growing.

Marvin had once again created something unlikely, something people didn~{!/~}t know they wanted. But they did.

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Article Tags: art teacher, artificial flower arrangements, artificial flowers, artistic creativity, artistic ideas, artistic talents, beauty salon, catalogues, ceramics, floral arrangements, hair dryers, hardware salesman, kiln, knack, many different ways, marvin schwam, new suit, occasional failure, patrons, serial entrepreneur



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