a short history of zaid selling stuff and making money
selling sweets & bubble tea: the beginning
The first time I sold something was in secondary school.
I still don’t know why I did it. It wasn’t because I needed money – my parents gave me enough. I was always the incredibly awkward and shy kid so it makes even less sense why 13-year-old Zaid, in a brand new school, decided to sell Choki Choki & Sour Power to his 1F classmates. Yknw, these goodies:
I bought them in the morning under my block at 6am on the way to school & I’d resell them to sugar-loving classmates when I reached.
I kept no accounts but I am almost certain I just added 20cents to the cost price. So no, I didn’t become rich.
At some point, I stopped. Again, it didn’t make sense because the opportunity for expansion was ripe. Word had got round and kids would come from another class to 1F looking for me – the Choki Choki, Sour Power kid. But I stopped anyway. It could be because I hated that people started assuming I was a poor Malay boy forced into selling stuff for pocket money. Or I just couldn’t deal with the attention. We’ll never know.
The next thing I ever sold was Bubble Tea in 2006 – during the days where we didn’t know what Gong Cha was. Bubble tea then was made only by neighbourhood shops with colourful straws, fruity flavours and Oreo vanilla ice blended. We bought a full styrofoam box’s worth of assorted flavours from the Bishan auntie and my friends and I sold it around school & at a sports final we attended.
All the money went to our service-learning project that we fundraised for – but we had a lot of fun. It was also the first time I fell in love with serving the community…but that’s for another day, another post.
tuition, writing skills & time
I don’t remember selling anything in JC or NS, but I know I started giving tuition for the first time, probably in 2010. Over the years, I’ve taught Math, Physics, General Paper and Economics to teenagers – mostly only there because exams were coming up or their parents were afraid they’d mess up their lives.
I set my rates based on Google + asking them how much they wanted to pay. I also never specialised on any subject or target audience…and that was why this business never scaled. I was preparing for every class from scratch every week, for every student. Smart? Nope. But that’s also because I never saw it as a business. I essentially saw it as pocket money, coming in whenever it came up.
I’ll talk about part-time & freelance gigs in another post because this is getting long but in all honesty, the line is thin. What are jobs other than selling your expertise & the value you bring to a company?
So yes, those jobs taught me to sell too. I got money by selling my time to stack shelves at Shop N Save and cut lettuce in a freezing factory supplying (God forgive me) veggies to McDonald’s. I sold my way with words to people who needed copywriting, translation and transcription. I also sold my willingness to learn how to teach & facilitate…because I definitely didn’t have that skill. I did everything from corporate team-building events, Islamic education and special needs kids to conversational Malay and design thinking.
I did all these while studying at university and it helped me be independent & have some savings. Some part of me thinks that if I never stopped studying, I would have continued earning money doing these random things.
But once you graduate, you kinda have to get a job. Who knew it’d be in selling things?
learning the art of business development
Not me, that’s for sure.
I had already developed an anti-capitalist streak that made me despise Corporate Life too much to even try. Having experienced the civil service during my internship, I didn’t think I could do that either. So armed with a Political Science degree from a university some employers assumed taught entirely in Malay (true story), I applied to whatever job sounded like it was doing some kind of good for society.
In December 2017, I found myself in Majulah Community. I had thought I would be part of the Youth Work team designing programmes but my boss (and God) had other plans – my first-ever full-time job title was Sales & Marketing Executive.
At the first chance I could, we changed the department name to Community Engagement (CE) and I became a Community Engagement Executive. When I led the CE team, I became Chief Partnerships Officer. But despite my best efforts to hide it with other words, the truth was that our job was selling.
Or to be even clearer – it was to make money.
And we did. We were B2B, or often B2G (Business-to-Business / Government, in case any of you were as clueless as me before all this). We also got money from applying to grants. I remember my boss giving us a $1million revenue target in my first year. We never reached it – even after I left – but we made enough to grow in 4 years.
I remember the first time I sold a client accepted a proposal I wrote, budgeted, priced & pitched. I learnt what cashflow, pipelines and payroll was. Sending invoices and receiving money for them always felt like a kind of magic[1]. Most of what we sold was in the thousands, and the largest contracts had six digits (like I said, we never hit a million). Over time, my threshold for what I thought was ridiculous money got higher – or more accurately, I better understood:
- the amount of work that really went into making something great, and how to value that work
- that organisations had budgets bigger than our annual revenue, that they had to spend it, and could do so without losing a single brain cell to worry
- to employ people, you have to make enough money to pay them.
We underpriced ourselves like mad in those years and I only learnt that lesson at my next job when I saw the kind of prices people were willing to pay, if you asked for it. The skills, though, were the same – build relationships, understand needs, co-curate, deliver well.
to sell is human
After 20 years of accidentally falling into selling things and learning so much along the way, I’m sitting here now trying to decide what I’d like to sell for (at least) the next 3 years. With everything I now have/know, how would I like to make money?
A famous guy called Daniel Pink says that to sell is human.
I’m trying to put into words what I don’t like about that statement. It’s unfair, but perhaps what I hear is the opposite: that to be human, we have to sell. Sell everything – our time, skills, possessions and ultimately, our soul.
The world almost forces us into thinking like this. We’re scared by the threat of poverty and surrounded by corporations and governments who do think like this – but it isn’t actually true.
I genuinely never planned to get to this point where I’m fairly confident in my ability to sell anything. But I’m here, and after writing this, I now know how I even got here.
Selling isn’t evil. Making money isn’t evil. Greed is evil. Oppression and injustice is evil. Debt is evil. To decide what to sell next, there’s just two things I’d like to remember:
Don’t be evil.
And like 13-year-old Zaid, you just have to do it. The path – 20 years of it – will appear when you start walking.
[1] …except for the few times where we didn’t receive money and it was a unique form of torture. It made me realise how much of all this is really just trust – which, to be fair, works 99% of the time.
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