Why I became an entrepreneur

This is the video from the November 3, 2010 Club E Meeting where I do tell much of my entrepreneurial beginning stories.


I grew up in the uber-affluent town of New Canaan, Connecticut, where my family enjoyed the finest of everything in the cocoon-like environment of suburbia. My mother was the ultimate housewife, engaged in ferrying her four children to sports practices, PTA and otherly motherly functions, while my father commuted by train every day to Madison Avenue in NYC.

Dad had often preached that none of his children were ever to go into his chosen field of Advertising and indeed, I could see why. The pace was furious, the pressure intense...even if the material rewards were evident in our large, sprawling Georgian Colonial, our beautiful Antebellum country club in Darien and the beach club on Shippan Point on Long Island Sound. As young children, we were never quite sure what our dad did, except it had to do with television commercials and ad campaigns, etc.

At the age of 15, a large account at my father's agency "went South." This happened periodically in the world of Advertising as a rival agency abscounded with a client who was seeking greater creative and greener pastures. The net result to the losing agency was that a shift of personnel was made, if a replacement account could not be secured. In this case, the account was so large and deemed irreplaceable that my father "fell on his sword" and resigned, joining the dozens of ad agency staff that had lost their jobs.

My father had been in Advertising for 30 years and had one of the finest pedigrees around in the field. He had risen to top positions at such powerhouses (at the time) of Compton, Doyle, Dane and Ogilvy, even reaching the Board of Directors. Dad had the honor of actually knowing and working alongside some of the greatest minds in Advertising like Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy.

Forced unemployment was not going to cause our family to miss its next meal. My grandfather has been a first round investor in what turned out to become the country's largest independent oil company, which even reached the status of membership on the Big Board (NYSE). We were set financially but in the "Go Go" 60s and 70s, where the patriarch was firmly entrenched in the role of provider and breadwinner, losing one's job was akin to having contracted leprosy and often resulted in the breaking of a man's spirit and even his emasculization.

Of course, my father reasoned, his unemployment would be short-lived. After all, hadn't he taken great care to help scores of others on his own rise to the top and wouldn't those folks remember his kindness and reciprocate with job leads and maybe even a new position for him?

To be continued...

Best to all,

Peter J. Burns, III
Founder