An excerpt from the School for Startups Radio Interview with Steve Strauss….

Like many small business people, I grew up in a small business household. My dad took a single little carpet store in Southern California in the ‘60s where I grew up and turned it into the biggest carpet chain in the whole LA area. Turned it into 16 or 17 different stores and we talked about entrepreneurship and small business growing up.

In fact, I remember the story once when I was about seven years old, I was told to write a paper on what my dad did for a living. And I couldn’t wrap my brain around a retail carpet store owner. It didn’t make sense like lawyer or doctor, like the other kids. So I said, “Dad what do I say? What do you do? And he said, “Well Steve, I’m an entrepreneur.” An entrepre – what? I’d never heard the word before and especially even in the ‘60s. It is a very fashionable word now, but it wasn’t back then.

And I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, “That’s a person who is willing to take a risk with money to make money.” A person who is willing to take a risk with money to make money – I always loved that idea and so throughout college and onward, the idea of owning my own business really stuck in the back of my head.

And I had a couple of small ventures when I was in college, nothing terribly successful and all of them moderately making a little or losing a little bit of money. And I really had a bit for writing, I realized I was good at it, so I tried to become a freelance writer, but just no one really cared what Steve Strauss had to say about anything.

And the back-up plan was law school. And my wife and my soon-to-be stepdaughter – we were raising a family and having some kids, so I needed to make some money. So, I went to law school, and I liked it. But you know, Jim, even in law school, I liked writing and small business. So those are the courses I geared toward. I did a lot of writing in law school which people do and took classes on how to start your own law practice. And I worked for the man for a couple of years after law school.

But, frankly, I was, and I think this is true for a lot of entrepreneurs, I was a bad employee. I didn’t like taking direction. I had my own ideas and eventually I got fired. They told me I wasn’t a good enough writer. So when it comes up and my books are published, to the partner who fired me I will say, “I hope I wrote my books okay.”

But what it did, it allowed me to go start my own business, my own law firm. So I had a background in it, I did it myself and then most of my practices are about small business. So it’s just something I love and I’m passionate about.

But I started out as a litigator as a lot of people out of law school do because that was a job I could get. But it wasn’t me, it didn’t fit me. So when I started my own practice, I ended up into a nice practice of small business incorporations, helping people get financing, some bankruptcy when they were going out of business, and that was all interesting and good. But what happened was I liked running the business more than I liked practicing law. I liked the idea of how do I get clients and putting on seminars and trying new marketing ideas.

And so I kept writing and finally, I did finally get a publisher to publish me, because I think a law degree made a big difference. I have a daughter who is going off to college now and I tell her, “Law school – you may not want to be a lawyer, but it does give you some credibility in the world.”  It teaches you how to think, it teaches you how to read and write well, and all things served me very well and so it served me to my senior. I was ready.

To hear the rest of this interview, click here.