At 13, I Started a Company of Kids Showing Grandparents How to Use Computers. The Matching Shirts We Wore Taught Me An Important Lesson. The shirts were the first customer-focused system I ever built.
By John Winner •
This story appears in the May 2023 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Everything I do today in business can be traced back to lessons I learned when starting my first company at the age of 13. That's why I still hang on to my first uniform: an oversized yellow Tommy Bahama shirt emblazoned with an orange and black logo for "Winner Computing." It looks like something a retiree would wear to a bowling alley, which perhaps explains why it was a hit with the customers in my gray-haired South Florida neighborhood.