The Smart Entrepreneur How to Build for a Successful Business Bart Clarysse

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The Smart Entrepreneur How to Build for a Successful
Business Bart Clarysse Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Bart Clarysse; Sabrina Kiefer
ISBN(s): 9781904027881, 1904027881
Edition: Paperback
File Details: PDF, 2.84 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to many entrepreneurs, scholars and students, near and far, whose experiences and insights have found their
way in some form into our thinking and this book, but who are too many to name here.
Kristien De Wolf was instrumental in co-developing, over the years with Bart Clarysse, a practical and structured method
for coaching entrepreneurs which provided the inspiration for this book, and in helping us to deliver the method in its present
form at Imperial College Business School. Johan Bruneel, another valued colleague, read early versions of many of the
chapters and made useful suggestions.
Jean-Marc de Fety, Wouter Van Roost, Professor Colin Caro and Igor Faletski generously shared their time and enthusiasm
in interviews for case studies. We also thank Luc Krolls and Rika Ponnet for consenting to our use of their written materials
and video-recorded presentations for the case study in Chapter 4, and thank Bruce Girvan, Chris Thompson, Tom Allason,
Frank Gielen, Johan Cardoen, Emma Stanton, Mirjam Knockaert, Mathew Holloway and Matthew Judkins for their
contributions to the content and accuracy of case studies elsewhere in the book.
Matthew Dixon, of patent and trade mark attorneys Harrison Goddard Foote, cast an attentive and critical eye over Chapter
6, helping to make certain that our treatment of the ins and outs of intellectual property was precise and reliable. Chris Haley of
Imperial Innovations helped us to identify a fitting science commercialisation story for our theme in Chapter 1.
In addition, three teams of students on the Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design (IE&D) programme at Imperial College
Business School created Figures 16 and 17 (Richard Lough, Rosie Illingworth, Howell Wong, Philippa Mothersill, Yann Helle
and Lino Vital), Figure 36 (Stacey Sunderland, Christina Stampfli, Damon Millar, Joel Tomlinson, Prashant Jain and Sebastian
Lee), and Figure 37 (Solomon Oniru, Clementine James, Olga Borets, Saravanogiri Manoharan, and Luke Trybula).
We also thank Professors David Begg, Principal of Imperial College Business School, and David Gann, Chair in Technology
and Innovation Management, for their support to the activities of the Entrepreneurship Hub at Imperial College, which made the
IE&D programme possible.
Finally, we’d like to thank the people at Elliott & Thompson for their support, advice, patience and, finally, gentle nudge to
get on with it and complete the book, particularly chairman Lorne Forsyth, former and present publishers Mark Searle and
Olivia Bays, project manager Jennie Condell and copy editor Kate O’Leary. We are also grateful to author and friend David
Charters for introducing us to this affable publishing firm.

CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I Idea creation and evaluation
1 Understanding the fit between opportunities and ideas
2 Fine-tuning demand-driven ideas and solutions
3 Shaping applications from knowledge-driven ideas
II From idea to business proposition
4 Segmenting your market and using preferred witnesses
5 Carving out a place in your business environment
6 Protecting your business ideas from imitation
7 Choosing entrepreneurial strategies for entering new markets
III Proof of concept
8 Using prototyping
9 Testing the market
IV Marshalling resources
10 Setting up venture teams
11 Seeking sources of capital
12 Introducing the venture roadmap and basic financials
Epilogue: the entrepreneurial business case
Notes
Index
Copyright

INTRODUCTION
“When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band…. Now they pretend they are in a start-up. ”1
The entrepreneurial dream
Over the last 15 or so years, ‘entrepreneurship’ has become synonymous with ‘cool’. Paraphrasing the above quotation, you
could say that garage rock has been replaced by garage start-ups.
Enterprise has also become a more accessible option for a larger group of people than previously, thanks to the advent of
new technological opportunities. In the 1990s, as the reach of the internet and world wide web spread beyond the academic
and governmental space into the civilian and commercial arenas, new business models could be conceived to transfer normally
face-to-face commercial interactions into the virtual world. Services could be automated and productised, customers could be
reached and products downloaded globally, niche markets could be created and served in an economical and unprecedentedly
profitable manner. A venture could be started at little cost by a few people tapping code on some computers. A relatively
inexpensive website interface could replace a capital-intensive chain of bricks and mortar shops or branches, and a customer
base could be built up quickly and ‘virally’.
Hence was born a new generation of technology entrepreneurs, whose celebrity status was achieved in record time and
stretched beyond the ‘in’ community of Silicon Valley to the readership of the broadsheet dailies, not to mention television and
films. From a business perspective, things became a little silly at the end of the 1990s, when many investors were willing to
fund any revenue-less proposition that involved a website, but after the bubble burst a sobered-up new economy began to
materialise in the new millennium.
Perhaps not sober enough, though. Entrepreneurship has turned into something of an industry in its own right, spawning a
slew of how-to and how-I-did-it books, fanzine-like websites about the start-up scene, and blogs by entrepreneurs and venture
capital investors. European universities have played catch-up with those in the US by setting up entrepreneurship centres,
business plan competitions, start-up incubators and student entrepreneurship clubs. Politicians and policymakers sing the
praises of technological innovators and entrepreneurs as the seeders of future economic growth, and sometimes create public
agencies to promote enterprise culture. ‘Entrepreneurial attitude’ has also come to be considered a positive attribute in high-
level job seekers.
Throughout this quasi-industry runs the inebriatingly romantic and inspirational image of the lone entrepreneur; something of
a renegade and iconoclast, a charismatic autodidact with an unconventional dress sense (or perhaps none at all), who knows
what people will want to purchase before they know it themselves. The archetypal entrepreneur’s start-up company generally
begins its life in a shed, garage or student house (probably in California), an impressively contrasting image to that of the
minnow firm’s subsequent expansion into a multi-billion-dollar company.
Why do we propose to join this industry by producing yet another book on entrepreneurship? First, because we have been
coaching entrepreneurs since the mid-nineties and were deeply involved in a number of start-ups ourselves. Over time, we saw
that the same sorts of problems were raised, almost repetitively, by the different entrepreneurs who came to us for help. Often,
just one or two workshops gave them enough of a grounding to get started and overcome initial barriers to growing their
ventures. We turned the vast amount of material accumulated through this experience into a core entrepreneurship programme at
Imperial College Business School which, we think, has become rather good. This book is an extension of that programme and
reflects our hands-on approach to coaching students through entrepreneurial projects and starting entrepreneurs on their
journeys.
Second, because the above-mentioned typecast character and many books on entrepreneurship hail from the US, we think a
need exists for a book which offers a European perspective, using European case studies and taking into account some of the
challenges faced by European entrepreneurs, including the higher degree of scepticism and risk aversion generally found on
this side of the Atlantic. The European entrepreneur does not necessarily fit the mythical American stereotype (and many US
entrepreneurs probably don’t either). Many of the examples in this book thus provide useful guidance for UK and European
entrepreneurs and students interested in entrepreneurship.
Third, because not every entrepreneurial light-bulb moment is destined to become the next Google. A tremendous amount of
uncertainty surrounds every venture idea at its conception, and we hope that the structured approach presented here can help
the reader to manage that uncertainty, by testing his early assumptions about a business idea and adjusting them, if need be, to

end up with a more probable business proposition. We don’t want to take the excitement or vision out of entrepreneurship, but
we do want to insert a bit of realism.
We also hope to convey some insights from academic research that may be applied in practical ways to the shaping of a
business concept and the creation of a company – not as hard and fast rules but as initial aids to face the uncertainty inherent in
a new venture with an open and dispassionate mind.
The lowest-common-denominator advice frequently given to novice or aspiring entrepreneurs tends to be construed by its
recipients as:
• Get an idea and set out to write a business plan.
• Search for information in support of your idea to plug into the business plan (shoehorn it in, if necessary).
• Pitch the business plan confidently to investors and raise money.
However, we stress that, before you can convince an investor or even a customer, you need to convince yourself, with an
argument that’s a little more than personal conviction or the citation of some high-level market figures from a generic industry
report. That’s why we propose a book about putting together a business case for a new venture, not a book on how to write a
business plan.
A business plan is simply a document describing the business you intend to start – essentially, what it will sell, how it will
operate and how it will make money. An entrepreneurial business case is the rationale embedded in the business plan,
explaining why the business is capable of thriving – the substance of your business plan. This book aims to provide the tools to
build a credible rationale.
Entrepreneurial reality
Only 45 per cent of businesses started in the UK in 2002 survived the five years to 2007,2 and the average sales turnover for
small and medium-sized enterprises (less than 250 employees, accounting for 99.9 per cent of UK businesses) in 2007 was
£298,000.3 To reiterate, not all new businesses become Google. Note that these figures cover a period of relative economic
prosperity, not a recession. Furthermore, these are general numbers referring to any type of new firm, including small
businesses in mature, stable sectors, such as a local restaurant or corner shop.
What we instead call entrepreneurial ‘venturing’ – starting innovative businesses with high-growth ambition and subject to
considerable uncertainty and risk – cannot rely on such stable sectors and business models, and it is this area of new business
creation that we address in this book. Innovative ventures typically deal with a product, market or idea that’s so novel that little
past data or experience exists from which to generate easy predictions about its success. Such start-up ventures also lack the
financial resources, established reputations and staying power of large companies. The venture entrepreneur doesn’t yet have a
direct line of communication to potential customers; in fact, at the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey she may not even
know who the right customers will be, nor how the business should be structured. With no exact statistics for business survival
in this unstable environment, a failure rate of some three out of four start-ups is the oft-quoted rule of thumb.
This book is consequently aimed primarily at innovation-and high growth-oriented businesses, usually in the form of
technology ventures or businesses with new product and service models. Entrepreneurs in these novel situations may need
considerable financial capital to start, thus requiring a plan for high growth to justify the investment, and are likely to have less
room for trial and error once capital has been invested. Consequently, they have to proceed in small incremental steps,
investing time and money in stages, making use of any information they can obtain, applying some cool judgement and willingly
adjusting their plans as they become wiser.
We often apply the analogy of dating and finding a spouse to the process of developing a start-up. When you first meet a
potential partner, your information about that person is incomplete. Consequently, you’re unlikely to propose a commitment to
marriage the next day. Nor can you really undertake meticulous research – you’d have to contact your prospect’s friends and
former love interests and they’re unlikely to be accommodating. So, perhaps you start with a short date for coffee and, if that
goes well, follow it with a dinner date and so on. At each meeting you learn a bit more about the person, perhaps eventually
meet some of their friends, and at each stage your increased insight helps you decide whether to go further. If you discover a
‘deal-breaker’ flaw, you eventually wind down the relationship; if your perceptions and experiences continue to be
predominantly positive, or more positive than negative, you take the further steps leading to a possible long-term commitment.
The decision to start a venture develops in a similar manner, with gradually increasing degrees of personal and material
investment.

Who is this book for?
This book will appeal to the following readers:
Aspiring entrepreneurs. You may be considering taking a break from a career in industry or finance to start a venture of your
own. Perhaps you’ve been turning an idea over in your head for some time, but aren’t entirely sure how to make it happen. You
may have some technical and business skills and knowledge, but not the entire range needed to incubate a new venture. You
want to develop these skills to some extent yourself and, even more importantly, understand enough to identify the right skilled
people to complement you in the enterprise.
More specifically, if you’ve been working in an established business or running your own company in a stable environment,
chances are that your acquired management skills haven’t equipped you to understand, navigate and mitigate the uncertainty
that’s typical of a new venture, where the environment in which your business operates – or your knowledge of it – frequently
shifts and demands that you reshape your idea.
Students, academics and inventors. If you’re a student on a business, engineering or science course, you may have been
tasked with developing an entrepreneurial project as part of your coursework. Or you may be thinking of starting a business
outside of your studies or after you graduate. Or you’re putting a business plan together for a competition.
This isn’t a textbook to prepare you for an exam or to write an essay on entrepreneurship; rather, it’s a practical manual to
help you research and prepare a credible business case. The content is the same as that offered to our MBA students on the
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design course at Imperial College Business School, and – in amended form – to students in
the engineering, medicine and science faculties.
If you’re an academic considering commercialising an invention or piece of research, this book will also help you
understand important aspects of commercialising new knowledge or technology.
Industry. You may be a manager who aims to stimulate entrepreneurial thinking and innovation in your company, or an
employee who’d like to launch an ‘intrapreneurship’ idea. How can the engineers and technicians who design and build
products communicate and work with the marketing people who understand customers and the finance people who run cost–
benefit analyses? And how can they co-operatively address the stumbling blocks and avoid the blind spots of habit that arise
when you depart from established business activity to pursue new opportunities?
This book addresses these different modes of thinking, and includes exercises we have used with success both in university
courses and workshops aimed at students of business and other disciplines – such as engineering, science and design – and in
executive education sessions on corporate venturing. It can be used on its own or as a handbook for such sessions, as well as
for ‘accelerator’ courses, aimed at developing career skills, such as those run by universities and company academies.
Investors. Finally, you may be entering the world of new venture investment, either as an angel investor preparing to risk your
own money or as an employee of a venture capital fund. This book can just as easily be used as a due diligence tool to help you
assess a potential investment.
If you’re an experienced investor, you can recommend this book to new or aspiring entrepreneurs so they can understand
how to satisfy your investment criteria.
How to use this book
The book is divided into four sections, which we present as stages in an entrepreneurial journey. This construct is somewhat
artificial, as the evolution of a new business concept is neither so linear nor so predictable in reality. To aid the reader’s
understanding, however, the information must be presented in a linear and reasonably logical fashion.
Stage 1: Idea creation and evaluation
Our aim in this section is to look at how business ideas are matched with credible opportunities, whether you’re starting from a
perceived market or from a technology or competence that you’d like to commercialise. We emphasise the importance of
considering a range of possibilities and evaluating each new idea with respect to existing alternatives already on the market,
and perhaps modifying or improving it accordingly.
Stage 2: From idea to business proposition
This section looks at the broadening of an initial idea for a product, service or application into a rounded business strategy, by
employing preferred witness research (see Chapter 4) to identify and roughly quantify a target market. We show you how to
consider the opportunities or limitations of your prospective business environment (Chapter 5), how to protect your ideas and

inventions from imitation by competitors (Chapter 6), and how to draw on this information to shape a commercial strategy
(Chapter 7).
Stage 3: Proof of concept
This section covers ways to demonstrate and test your business proposition, both technically and commercially, through
prototyping and some rough-and-ready market testing.
Stage 4: Marshalling resources
This section describes the resources – primarily human and financial – you need to bring a business to fruition, and discusses
how to work out a strategy and roadmap for obtaining the most suitable resources at the right time.
Depending on the current status of your business idea, you may find yourself reading each chapter sequentially from start to
finish, or jumping forwards and backwards from one topic to another as you need them – rather like consulting a recipe book.
Each chapter is thus structured as a self-contained mini-manual, but also refers to related content in other chapters.
Several chapters contain a structured how-to exercise to help you assess and shape a certain aspect of your business case.
While these exercises may at first seem rather formulaic, practising them offers a way to retrain your thinking about issues that
every venture must consider. Each new venture has a particular set of objectives and problems, so some activities or exercises
will be more relevant to your concept than others. Each chapter also contains case examples to illustrate the real-world
relevance of each topic.
The Epilogue aims to tie the pieces together and outlines what we hope you can achieve from using this book. No book is a
panacea for all problems and no methodology is fool-proof, but our aim is to get you fairly far along the initial process of
‘dating’ your business idea.
We wish you well on your entrepreneurial journey.

SECTION I
IDEA CREATION AND EVALUATION
1. UNDERSTANDING THE FIT BETWEEN OPPORTUNITIES
AND IDEAS
Fitting opportunities to ideas
New ventures aren’t conceived in one sitting. Every new venture starts with a perception of an opportunity and the small seed
of an idea. During the entrepreneurial journey that follows, this initial hunch will be investigated and developed, reality-tested,
corrected, investigated and developed a bit more, reality-tested again and so on. The process continues until an entrepreneur
feels enough certainty about the potential value of the idea to think investing time and money (her own and other people’s) in it
worthwhile – or else discards it as unfeasible.
Before anything else, your venture will rest on two essential ingredients: the identification of a good opportunity and a
solution to exploit that opportunity. This stage of your entrepreneurial journey – the idea stage – introduces you to the early
building blocks for finding these two ingredients.
The first thing you’ll do on your journey – and the first thing an investor will eventually ask you to do when you come to
meet one – is to outline your opportunity and your solution. So we devote two chapters to introducing different ways of finding
and assessing opportunities and solutions. This isn’t a one-off exercise, however; you’ll refine your opportunity definition as
you move through the subsequent stages of your journey, exploring all the factors that could help or hinder your business.
Most of this book is about testing, elaborating and modifying your initial idea about your opportunity and your solution. This
first section is devoted to making a few early and basic decisions about your idea(what the business might sell, or several
variations) and why it may be a sellable business proposition (the opportunity), using information you already have or can
obtain fairly easily, mixed with a bit of your intuition. Later sections of the book are devoted to gathering more information to
test your early assumptions.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs move straight from this early idea stage into writing a business plan, and will selectively seek
out information that backs their original idea. We do not recommend this approach. Like the first draft of a document, your first
idea is more of a hypothesis than a reality, and likely to need retuning before it becomes a proposal for a viable business. Stage
1 helps you make your idea clear and concrete enough for you to start investigating its value in the next stage.
Sources of opportunity
Your opportunity is the compelling reason why your business idea would appeal to customers, and is usually defined as an
unsolved problem, a gap in the market or an unaddressed ‘customer pain’ with respect to existing products or services. Your
solution is the thing you’ll sell, which may be a product, service or combination of the two, or possibly a platform technology
that will be turned into products by others.
It is important to emphasise that, even if you have already devised a technology or designed a product, you’ll need to find a
genuinely compelling opportunity to sell into. If you don’t find a compelling opportunity, you won’t have a viable business.
Starting points for new venture ideas typically fall into two broad categories:
• The demand–pull idea. This arises in response to a customer need or problem, whereby the entrepreneur needs to
create a profitable, innovative solution to meet a need.
• The ‘knowledge–push’ idea. This typically involves a new technology or competence, whereby an innovative
solution itself may seem like an opportunity but the entrepreneur must seek a profitable area of application and
market – that is, a problem seeking that solution.
We dedicate one chapter to each type of starting point, containing different thinking tools to aid your first steps. The rest of the

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OTHER BOOKS BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Windy McPherson’s Son, A novel
Marching Men, A novel
Mid-American Chants, Chants
Winesburg, Ohio, A book of tales
Poor White, A novel
The Triumph of the Egg, A book of tales
Many Marriages, A novel

HORSES AND MEN
Tales, long and short, from
our American life
BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc.
MCMXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
PRINTED IN U.S.A.

TO THEODORE DREISER
In whose presence I have sometimes had
the same refreshed feeling as when in
the presence of a thoroughbred horse.

Some of the tales in this book have been printed in
The Little Review, The New Republic, The Century,
Harper’s, The Dial, The London Mercury and Vanity
Fair, to which magazines the author makes due
acknowledgment.

FOREWORD
Did you ever have a notion of this kind—there is an orange, or say
an apple, lying on a table before you. You put out your hand to take
it. Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you
touched? Have you eaten? That’s what I wonder about.
The whole subject is only important to me because I want the
apple. What subtle flavors are concealed in it—how does it taste,
smell, feel? Heavens, man, the way the apple feels in the hand is
something—isn’t it?
For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its
fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole
out through my room, through a window and into the streets. It
made itself a part of all the smells of the streets. The devil!—in
Chicago or Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Cleveland it would have had a
rough time.
That doesn’t matter.
The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye
I often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward
the object of my desire and then came back.
There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours
passed. I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any
existence. Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the
moment, out of the world of darkness into the light?
It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see.
It may be I am deaf.

My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble?
Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking at my own hands.
With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the
form of things concealed in the darkness?

DREISER
Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head,
Fine, or superfine?
Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how
many years he has lived, perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, but he is very
old. Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that has been in the
world perhaps forever, is personified in him.
When Dreiser is gone men shall write books, many of them, and in
the books they shall write there will be so many of the qualities
Dreiser lacks. The new, the younger men shall have a sense of
humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More
than that, American prose writers shall have grace, lightness of
touch, a dream of beauty breaking through the husks of life.
O, those who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does
not have. That is a part of the wonder and beauty of Theodore
Dreiser, the things that others shall have, because of him.
Long ago, when he was editor of the Delineator, Dreiser went one
day, with a woman friend, to visit an orphan asylum. The woman
once told me the story of that afternoon in the big, ugly grey
building, with Dreiser, looking heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a
platform, folding and refolding his pocket-handkerchief and watching
the children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.
“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the
woman said, and that is a real picture of Theodore Dreiser. He is old
in spirit and he does not know what to do with life, so he tells about

it as he sees it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks
and he folds and refolds the pocket-handkerchief and shakes his
head.
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his
books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose.
The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet.
They are tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path.
Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and
delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run
children, shouting, “Look at me. See what I and my fellows of the
new day have done”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who
follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their
road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to
face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that
Dreiser faced alone.
Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head,
Fine, or superfine?

TALES OF THE BOOK
Page
ix Foreword
xi Dreiser
3 I’m a Fool
21 The Triumph of a Modern
31 “Unused”
139 A Chicago Hamlet
185 The Man Who Became a
Woman
231 Milk Bottles

245 The Sad Horn Blowers
287 The Man’s Story
315 An Ohio Pagan

I
I’M A FOOL
T was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to
face. And it all came about through my own foolishness, too. Even
yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick
myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of
satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.
It began at three o’clock one October afternoon as I sat in the
grand stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio.
To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in the
grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my home
town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had
taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was
campaigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and
my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in
our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during
the week before I left. They both thought it something disgraceful
that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race
horses. I’ve an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would
stand in the way of her getting the job she’d been working so long
for.
But after all I had to work, and there was no other work to be got.
A big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn’t just hang around the
house and I had got too big to mow people’s lawns and sell
newspapers. Little chaps who could get next to people’s sympathies
by their sizes were always getting jobs away from me. There was
one fellow who kept saying to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed
or a cistern cleaned, that he was saving money to work his way

through college, and I used to lay awake nights thinking up ways to
injure him without being found out. I kept thinking of wagons
running over him and bricks falling on his head as he walked along
the street. But never mind him.
I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along
splendid together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body
and soft, kind eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like
Jack Johnson. He had Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that
could do 2.09 or 2.10, if he had to, and I had a little gelding named
Doctor Fritz that never lost a race all fall when Harry wanted him to
win.
We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two horses
and after that, until late November, we kept moving along to the
race meets and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I’ll say that.
Sometimes now I think that boys who are raised regular in houses,
and never have a fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and go to high
schools and college, and never steal anything, or get drunk a little,
or learn to swear from fellows who know how, or come walking up in
front of a grand stand in their shirt sleeves and with dirty horsey
pants on when the races are going on and the grand stand is full of
people all dressed up—What’s the use of talking about it? Such
fellows don’t know nothing at all. They’ve never had no opportunity.
But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the
bandages on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of
valuable things for any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a
horse’s leg so smooth that if it had been the same color you would
think it was his skin, and I guess he’d have been a big driver, too,
and got to the top like Murphy and Walter Cox and the others if he
hadn’t been black.
Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town, maybe say
on a Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday and
lasted until Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say in the 2.25
trot on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday afternoon Bucephalus
would knock ’em cold in the “free-for-all” pace. It left you a lot of

time to hang around and listen to horse talk, and see Burt knock
some yap cold that got too gay, and you’d find out about horses and
men and pick up a lot of stuff you could use all the rest of your life,
if you had some sense and salted down what you heard and felt and
saw.
And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over,
and Harry had run home to tend up to his livery stable business, you
and Burt hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and steady
across country, to the place for the next meeting, so as to not over-
heat the horses, etc., etc., you know.
Gee whizz, Gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and
oaks and other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red,
and the good smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep
River, and the country girls at the windows of houses and
everything. You can stick your colleges up your nose for all me. I
guess I know where I got my education.
Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way,
say now on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, “let’s lay up here.”
And you did.
And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them, and you
got your good clothes out of a box and put them on.
And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could see
you were race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nigger
before and was afraid and run away when the two of us walked
down their main street.
And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so
you went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and
stood around, and there was always someone pretended he was
horsey and knew things and spoke up and began asking questions,
and all you did was to lie and lie all you could about what horses you
had, and I said I owned them, and then some fellow said “will you
have a drink of whiskey” and Burt knocked his eye out the way he

could say, off-hand like, “Oh well, all right, I’m agreeable to a little
nip. I’ll split a quart with you.” Gee whizz.
But that isn’t what I want to tell my story about. We got home late
in November and I promised mother I’d quit the race horses for
good. There’s a lot of things you’ve got to promise a mother because
she don’t know any better.
And so, there not being any work in our town any more than
when I left there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got
a pretty good place taking care of horses for a man who owned a
teaming and delivery and storage and coal and real-estate business
there. It was a pretty good place with good eats, and a day off each
week, and sleeping on a cot in a big barn, and mostly just shovelling
in hay and oats to a lot of big good-enough skates of horses, that
couldn’t have trotted a race with a toad. I wasn’t dissatisfied and I
could send money home.
And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky
and I got the day off and I went. I left the job at noon and had on
my good clothes and my new brown derby hat, I’d just bought the
Saturday before, and a stand-up collar.
First of all I went down-town and walked about with the dudes.
I’ve always thought to myself, “put up a good front” and so I did it. I
had forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West House, a
big hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. “Give me three twenty-
five cent cigars,” I said. There was a lot of horsemen and strangers
and dressed-up people from other towns standing around in the
lobby and in the bar, and I mingled amongst them. In the bar there
was a fellow with a cane and a Windsor tie on, that it made me sick
to look at him. I like a man to be a man and dress up, but not to go
put on that kind of airs. So I pushed him aside, kind of rough, and
had me a drink of whiskey. And then he looked at me, as though he
thought maybe he’d get gay, but he changed his mind and didn’t say
anything. And then I had another drink of whiskey, just to show him
something, and went out and had a hack out to the races, all to

myself, and when I got there I bought myself the best seat I could
get up in the grand stand, but didn’t go in for any of these boxes.
That’s putting on too many airs.
And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you
please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their
horses, and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets
swung over their shoulders, same as I had been doing all the year
before. I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up
there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the
yaps and feeling grander and more important, too. One thing’s about
as good as another, if you take it just right. I’ve often said that.
Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there was a
fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young
fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to
college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor
or something like that, but he wasn’t stuck on himself. There are
some of that kind are all right and he was one of the ones.
He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked
around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start
anything—she wasn’t that kind—and her eyes and mine happened to
meet.
You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach! She had on a soft
dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was
well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed
when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl
I’ve ever seen in my life. She wasn’t stuck on herself and she could
talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or
something like that. What I mean is, she was O. K. I think maybe
her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because
she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or
a drygoods store in their home town, or something like that. She
never told me and I never asked.

My own people are all O. K. too, when you come to that. My
grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he was
—But never mind that.
The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow
setting there with the two girls left them and went down to make a
bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn’t talk big and noisy and
let everyone around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn’t
that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls what
horse he’d bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all half got to
their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do when
they’ve got money down on a race, and the horse they bet on is up
there pretty close at the end, and they think maybe he’ll come on
with a rush, but he never does because he hasn’t got the old juice in
him, come right down to it.
And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18 pace and
there was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in his
string but Bob didn’t own him. He was a horse owned by a Mr.
Mathers down at Marietta, Ohio.
This Mr. Mathers had a lot of money and owned some coal mines
or something, and he had a swell place out in the country, and he
was stuck on race horses, but was a Presbyterian or something, and
I think more than likely his wife was one, too, maybe a stiffer one
than himself. So he never raced his horses hisself, and the story
round the Ohio race tracks was that when one of his horses got
ready to go to the races he turned him over to Bob French and
pretended to his wife he was sold.
So Bob had the horses and he did pretty much as he pleased and
you can’t blame Bob, at least, I never did. Sometimes he was out to
win and sometimes he wasn’t. I never cared much about that when
I was swiping a horse. What I did want to know was that my horse
had the speed and could go out in front, if you wanted him to.

And, as I’m telling you, there was Bob in this race with one of Mr.
Mathers’ horses, was named “About Ben Ahem” or something like
that, and was fast as a streak. He was a gelding and had a mark of
2.21, but could step in .08 or .09.
Because when Burt and I were out, as I’ve told you, the year
before, there was a nigger, Burt knew, worked for Mr. Mathers and
we went out there one day when we didn’t have no race on at the
Marietta Fair and our boss Harry was gone home.
And so everyone was gone to the fair but just this one nigger and
he took us all through Mr. Mathers’ swell house and he and Burt
tapped a bottle of wine Mr. Mathers had hid in his bedroom, back in
a closet, without his wife knowing, and he showed us this Ahem
horse. Burt was always stuck on being a driver but didn’t have much
chance to get to the top, being a nigger, and he and the other nigger
gulped that whole bottle of wine and Burt got a little lit up.
So the nigger let Burt take this About Ben Ahem and step him a
mile in a track Mr. Mathers had all to himself, right there on the
farm. And Mr. Mathers had one child, a daughter, kinda sick and not
very good looking, and she came home and we had to hustle and
get About Ben Ahem stuck back in the barn.
I’m only telling you to get everything straight. At Sandusky, that
afternoon I was at the fair, this young fellow with the two girls was
fussed, being with the girls and losing his bet. You know how a
fellow is that way. One of them was his girl and the other his sister. I
had figured that out.
“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I’m going to give him the dope.”
He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He and
the girls were nice to me right from the start and clear to the end.
I’m not blaming them.
And so he leaned back and I give him the dope on About Ben
Ahem. “Don’t bet a cent on this first heat because he’ll go like an

oxen hitched to a plow, but when the first heat is over go right down
and lay on your pile.” That’s what I told him.
Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a fat
man sitting beside the little girl, that had looked at me twice by this
time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do but have
the nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change places
with me so I could set with his crowd.
Gee whizz, craps amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to go
and get gay up there in the West House bar, and just because that
dude was standing there with a cane and that kind of a necktie on,
to go and get all balled-up and drink that whiskey, just to show off.
Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting
her smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down out of
that grand stand and all around that race track and made a faster
record than most of the skates of horses they had there that year.
Because that girl wasn’t any mutt of a girl. What wouldn’t I have
give right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozenger, or
some liquorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those twenty-five
cent cigars in my pocket and right away I give that fellow one and lit
one myself. Then that fat man got up and we changed places and
there I was, plunked right down beside her.
They introduced themselves and the fellow’s best girl, he had with
him, was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was a
manufacturer of barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the
fellow himself was named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss
Lucy Wessen.
I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my
trolley. A fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse,
and works taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery,
and storage business, isn’t any better or worse than any one else.
I’ve often thought that, and said it too.
But you know how a fellow is. There’s something in that kind of
nice clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had

looked at me, awhile before, over her brother’s shoulder, and me
looking back at her, and both of us blushing.
I couldn’t show her up for a boob, could I?
I made a fool of myself, that’s what I did. I said my name was
Walter Mathers from Marietta, Ohio, and then I told all three of them
the smashingest lie you ever heard. What I said was that my father
owned the horse About Ben Ahem and that he had let him out to
this Bob French for racing purposes, because our family was proud
and had never gone into racing that way, in our own name, I mean.
Then I had got started and they were all leaning over and listening,
and Miss Lucy Wessen’s eyes were shining, and I went the whole
hog.
I told about our place down at Marietta, and about the big stables
and the grand brick house we had on a hill, up above the Ohio River,
but I knew enough not to do it in no bragging way. What I did was
to start things and then let them drag the rest out of me. I acted
just as reluctant to tell as I could. Our family hasn’t got any barrel
factory, and, since I’ve known us, we’ve always been pretty poor, but
not asking anything of any one at that, and my grandfather, over in
Wales—but never mind that.
We set there talking like we had known each other for years and
years, and I went and told them that my father had been expecting
maybe this Bob French wasn’t on the square, and had sent me up to
Sandusky on the sly to find out what I could.
And I bluffed it through I had found out all about the 2.18 pace, in
which About Ben Ahem was to start.
I said he would lose the first heat by pacing like a lame cow and
then he would come back and skin ’em alive after that. And to back
up what I said I took thirty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to
Mr. Wilbur Wessen and asked him, would he mind, after the first
heat, to go down and place it on About Ben Ahem for whatever odds
he could get. What I said was that I didn’t want Bob French to see
me and none of the swipes.

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