My most profitable innovation, though, was flowers. The section of the hospital center where I stood was the most remote part of the complex, but it was where the visitors’ parking was placed. Weekdays this didn’t matter much, since most people were busy. But on weekends the lot filled up with visitors. I arranged with a local florist to deliver pails of prewrapped flower bouquets. The deal was I’d get half the money on each bunch sold and he’d take back the unsold inventory to sell at his store during the week. Flowers wound up being so profitable that some weeks just the flower profit for Saturday and Sunday was more than I made on the stand the whole rest of the week. I remember one Mother’s Day, which is by more than triple the best flower day of the year, I made over $300! If every day were Mother’s Day, I’d advise all entrepreneurs to forget about high tech and go into flowers.

Again and again I proved that by innovating you could take what was essentially a mediocre draw and turn it into a winning hand. Years later IDT would be the first call-back phone company to offer Internet access, E-mail-to-fax service, worldwide direct dialing, real phone calling over the Internet, and our own unlimited on-line service. These innovations raised us from being just another phone company to the most innovative company in the telecom business. Of course, not every new idea we’ve tried has been as successful as adding flowers. If fact, some haven’t worked at all. But the important thing is that whether you’re running a hot dog stand or a global telecom company, you’ve got to keep trying new things if you want to get ahead.

Back to the hot dog stand, the bar, and the old lady, though. One Sunday morning it seemed my whole business was crashing down around me. That morning another vendor with a huge mechanized stand came with his twenty-four-year-old son to take my spot. This vendor had a great spot in a commercial area during the week, and on Saturday an even better spot in the park where league ball games are played. (I can tell any prospective food vendor from experience that a field with several amateur baseball or football games going on is a gold mine. Even today, when I drive down the highway and see a series of occupied fields with no hot dog stands present, I am mentally tempted to pull over to the side and set up shop.) On Sunday, however, his park wasn’t that profitable, and so he came down to cash in on my visitor trade.

That would have been bad enough, as most first-time hospital visitors were unfamiliar with my superior onions and would clearly have preferred his gleaming stand to my homemade wooden one. But at least I’d still have my regulars and the flowers. His son went a step further, though. He came over and told me that this was his spot now, and I had fifteen minutes to clear out or he’d “come over and kick your a—.” Then he pulled a switchblade, exposed the blade, and said he’d kill me if I fought back. This was not a good situation, and I definitely did not want to have any part of my anatomy kicked, nor did I want to be stabbed. On the other hand, I wasn’t giving up my spot. So I just sat there for about fifteen minutes, and then I went into the Tender Trap and told the old lady that she should keep looking out the window and, if she saw anything happening to me, to call the cops at once. When I went back out to sell my hot dogs, though, the old lady emerged from the bar. I’d never seen her like this. She was hopping mad. She ran over to the father-and-son duo and started screaming at them that this was my spot and nobody was here before and it was wrong to steal a spot from a kid and they’d better leave right now or she was going to do something about it.


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