I did not grow up around entrepreneurs.
The men in my neighborhood worked real jobs. Assembly lines. Shops. Plants. General Motors. They left early, came home tired, and did what they had to do. The rich kids, or what I thought of as rich kids, had parents who were engineers, lawyers, doctors, people with titles. People who seemed to know how the world worked.
I did not know any of that.
What I knew was a paper route.
At ten years old, I was already thinking about routes, customers, collections, timing, and money. I did not call it business then. I did not have a pitch deck. I did not know what a margin was. I just knew that if I worked harder, remembered who paid, kept people happy, and showed up when I was supposed to, I could make money.
And once I made money, I needed somewhere to put it.
For me, that place was baseball cards.
Baseball cards were my portfolio.