Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings

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normal times, I would never have gotten by their secretaries. One of the 
most worthwhile clients of my entire business career, and a man whose 
family’s investments I still handle, was a typical example of this. Some 
years afterwards he told me that on the day I called he had had almost 
nothing to do and had already finished reading the sports section of the 
newspaper. So when my name and purpose were told him by his secre-
tary, he thought, “Listening to this guy will at least occupy my time.” He
confessed, “If you had come to see me a year or so later, you never
would have gotten into my office.” 
A FOUNDATION IS FORMED 
All this was to result in several years of very hard work in a tiny office 
with low overhead. With no windows and merely glass partitions to 
serve as two of the walls, my total floor space was little larger than that 
needed to jam together a desk, my chair, and one other chair. For this, 
together with free local telephone service and a reasonable amount of 
secretarial help from the secretary-receptionist of the gentleman from 
whom I leased this space, I paid the princely sum of $25 per month. My
only other expenses were stationery, postage and a very occasional long
distance call. The account book still in my possession provides an indi- 
cation of how difficult it really was to start a new business in 1932.After
very long hours of work over and above this overhead, I made a net 
profit averaging $2.99 per month for that year. In the still difficult year 
of 1933, I did a trifle better, showing an improvement of just under
1000 percent, an average monthly earnings of just over $29.This possi- 
bly was about what I would have made as a newsboy selling papers on 
the street. Yet in what those years were to bring me in the future, they 
were two of the most profitable years of my life. They provided me with 
the foundation for an extremely profitable business and with a group of 
highly loyal clients by 1935. It would be nice if I could claim that it was 
brilliant thinking on my part that caused me to start my business when
I did rather than waiting until better times were to arrive. Actually, it was 
the unattractiveness of the only job that seemed open to me that pushed 
me into it.