Business Opportunities Weblog

September 14, 2005 by Dane Carlson | 2 Comments

Fortune Small Business has a great excerpt from Paul Orfalea’s, the founder of Kinkos, new book, Copy This!:

In the fall of 1970 I rented a small storefront near the university, only 100 square feet. I was still a student at USC, but I couldn’t put off this brainstorm. The rent was $100 a month. The place was so small that by the time we needed a second machine we had to lug it out onto the sidewalk—yes, customers made their copies outdoors. A friend of mine who was an artist painted a series of mermaids on the walls around the counter. They wore star-spangled bikini tops, and their faces and hairdos looked like Marilyn Monroe’s.

Before we opened, we put a sandwich board out front advertising copies at 4 cents a page. My father just couldn’t comprehend how we could succeed by charging so little. He still co-signed on my loan, but it made no sense to him. “This company has as much chance of success as a fur company in Death Valley,” he argued.

We were still setting up shop when a professor came to us. He was stressed out and in a hurry. It was a state of mind all of us at Kinko’s would come to be intimately familiar with. Later on we would learn that we weren’t so much selling copies as assuaging anxiety. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he wanted it done yesterday. He placed a $50 order with us, and we hadn’t even opened. It was a good omen.

In Books, Customer Service, Employees, Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, Ideas, Operations | 2 Comments