Larry K. Siller
Growing up in Galveston, Texas, I was the average kid. My grades were average, and we had an average middle-class family. We were not poor, but we were nowhere close to rich. My dad made the extreme sacrifice to put all four of us boys through private school. My dad was pro-education and expected all of us to go to college, as we all did. As the oldest, I became the entrepreneur, while my other three brothers became a lawyer and two doctors. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew from early on that I would be good at it. I often thought about a pencil salesman. You don’t make much money on a pencil, but what if you sold them to everyone, and everyone wanted to buy their pencils from you? You could do pretty good. I just needed a direction in life to start to do things the best I could. I have lived the American Dream and have learned this stuff the hard way. I decided to write this book and pass on the knowledge to help people get ahead without making the same mistakes. Once you figure out that life is not perfect, and there is a lot of misinformation out there and loads of corruption from our government on down, you can start thinking for yourself. I have learned this stuff by doing it, and I have learned a lot of this by reading books by other experts. A lot of it is fascinating, and I wanted to pass it along and let you know the rest of the story.
From an early age I became an entrepreneur. In my teens I learned to build a seine, which is a fishing net, that could go around a whole city block. I would get some of my high school buddies and row the net around in a circle on the beach and pull it in to catch and sell fish to the local restaurants. In the winter, I learned to harvest oysters and sell them to my friends and neighbors. In the summer I would pull a small 12-foot shrimp net with my little boat and catch shrimp to sell.
When in high school, my father helped me buy a tennis racket stringing machine and I started stringing rackets for a number of different high schools and members of the Galveston racket club. Eventually, I got a dealership with the HEAD tennis racket company selling tennis shoes, rackets, and equipment. Since I was the tennis guy in Galveston, I was approached by the continuing education department of Galveston College to teach classes in the evenings. The program took off and we had to turn people away. It was a great vehicle for selling rackets and equipment to all the students. Because of the demand, I started teaching private tennis lessons and became very busy. I soon realized that I did not want to teach tennis all my life on a hot tennis court.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life so I decided to study marketing in school and graduated with a business degree. The one thing about a business degree is that you get no practical experience in anything and have to start from the bottom if you can find a job. My mother, playing cards with the CEO of the American Indemnity Insurance Company, landed me a marketing job in the insurance business. After a couple of years, I realized, I was not going to make my fortune working for an insurance company. A marketing rep from Penn National Insurance Company recognized my potential and offered me a contract to sell insurance for myself. I opened a small office and I was in business for myself selling insurance. It was a lot of work but I learned a lot about business and people and did quite good with it. Thank goodness my wife was an engineer and supported us while I got the ball rolling. After we started to make a few dollars, we wanted a house with a few acres of land. We started looking and could not find any land with a few acres for a house. I recognized that there was a demand for acreage lots and purchased 230 acres to subdivide into acreage lots. Now I was in the real estate business and you will have to read my book to get the rest of the story.
