by Dan Gutman
3
The Get Rich Quick Club
It was so obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?
Starting your own company was the American way. Anybody who ever got rich did it by starting their own company. So if we started our own company, we could get rich just like all those other rich people. That was the way I figured it.
My mom started her own company a few years ago. It didn’t seem so hard.
“Wait a minute,” Rob said. “Kids don’t start companies.”
“Why not?” I replied. “Is there some law that says a group of kids can’t start a company?”
“I think it would be grouse,”1 Quincy said.
“My uncle Donald started a company,” Eddie announced. “It’s called McDonald’s.”
“Oh, hush up.” I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Eddie’s stories. The wheels were turning in my head. There were a lot of things that had to be done.
“Yeah, let’s start a company,” Teddy said.
“Bloody oath!”2 Quincy agreed.
They all sat there for a few seconds in silence until Rob piped up. “How do you start a company?”
“Well, the first thing you need is a name,” I informed them all. “Take Kodak, for instance. Do you know how they got the name Kodak?”
“Doesn’t ‘Kodak’ mean ‘camera’ in Swedish or something?” Rob asked.
“Nah, ‘Kodak’ doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “I read about it in a book. The guy who started Kodak liked the letter K. He just made up the word ‘Kodak.’”
“That must have been a real Kodak moment,” Rob said.
“I like the letter W,” Eddie told us.
“My favorite letter is X,” said Teddy.
“Nobody cares what letters you sprogs like,” I snapped.
“Maybe we can make a name out of our names,” Rob suggested. “Like the RobGinaQuincy Club.”
“Or GinaRobQuincy Club,” I said.
“Or QuincyRobGina,” said Quincy.
“What about us?” Eddie whined. “We want our names in there too.”
“The name is too long already,” I told the twins.
“What about initials?” Rob said. “We could call it GRQ, for Gina, Rob, and Quincy.”
I thought about that. GRQ. It had a ring to it. Like IBM, or CNN. Then something occurred to me.
“You know,” I told the others, “GRQ stands for something else besides Gina, Rob, and Quincy.”
“What?” They all looked at me expectantly.
“Get rich quick!” I said.
And that was how we named the Get Rich Quick Club.
4
The Fine Points of Business
I could see the future—we’d have a big office building someday with the letters GRQ on it. Secretaries running around. A company jet. Warehouses scattered around the world. Everyone on the planet would know about the Get Rich Quick Club.
“The next order of business is a company motto,” I said.
“What’s a motto?” Teddy asked.
“I don’t know, what’s a motto with you?” Rob cracked.
“A motto,” I explained, “is a slogan. Like ‘All for one and one for all.’ That’s the motto of the three musketeers.”
“I thought the motto of the three musketeers was ‘Creamy, chewy, chocolate filling,’” Teddy said.
“Not those three musketeers!” I said irritably. “The other three musketeers.”
“There were six musketeers?” Eddie asked.
“How about ‘You tried the rest. Now try the best’?” Rob suggested.
“That’s not bad,” I said. “Did you make that up?”
“No,” Rob explained. “I saw it on a pizza box.”
“The next order of business,” I told them, “is that we need to have company bylaws. Bylaws are the rules of the company. You’ve got to follow the rules. If we don’t have rules, everything falls apart, and the next thing you know, we would be like savages, killing each other over a piece of meat.”
“What kind of bylaws?” Quincy asked.
“Well, for instance,” I said, “we all have to promise that we won’t run over each other with our bikes. That would be dangerous, right? So anybody who runs over another member of the GRQ with their bike should be kicked out of the GRQ. See what I mean? Can you think of any other bylaws we should have?”
“How about we can’t hit each other over the head with sharp sticks?” Eddie suggested.
“Well, of course that one,” I agreed. “Hitting each other over the head with sharp sticks can’t be allowed.”
“How about drowning?” suggested Teddy.
“Okay, okay. No drowning either.” I realized that introducing the idea of bylaws might have been a mistake.
“Poisoning?” Eddie asked.
“Throwing each other off cliffs?” Teddy said.
“There aren’t any cliffs around here,” I said impatiently.
“True enough,” Rob said. “But the twins bring up an excellent point. What if we go on a business trip somewhere and they have cliffs there? What if one of us gets upset and pushes another one of us off? What will happen if we don’t have any bylaw to cover it?”
“Okay, okay,” I agreed. “No throwing each other off cliffs. That’s enough bylaws. Let’s move on. We have to give out titles.”
“Titles?” Quincy asked. “What do you mean, titles?”
“Your job,” I explained. “Your position. In a real company, every employee has a title. For starters, I think I should be CEO.”
“I wanna be CEO!” Eddie shouted.
“You don’t even know what ‘CEO’ means,” I said.
“I don’t care,” Eddie whined. “It must be something good or you wouldn’t want to be it.”
“‘CEO’ stands for chief executive officer,” I said. “The boss.”
“Well, aren’t you the ant’s pants?”1 Quincy snickered.
“How come you get to be CEO?” Teddy complained.
“Because this whole thing was my idea,” I explained calmly. “Rob will be vice president.”
“What about me?” Quincy asked.
Quincy was new to our school, but she was already famous for being really artistic. She could draw just about anything on demand, without even having to trace it.
“Quincy will be the creative director,” I decreed. “And the twins, you will be secretaries.”
“I don’t wanna be a secretary!” Eddie immediately started wailing, as if I had said he would be beaten with a tennis racket.
“Secretaries have to answer the phone,” whimpered Teddy.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Rob pointed out. “We don’t have a phone.”
“Then we’ll have nothing to do!” Eddie whined. “At least if we had a phone, I could answer it.”
The rest of us rolled our eyes.
“How about drones?” Rob suggested. “You two can be the company drones.”
“What’s a drone?” Teddy and Eddie asked suspiciously.
“Drones are very important,” Rob told them. “A drone is like a busy bee in a beehive. That means you get to deliver secret messages and stuff. I wish I could be a drone.”
“Delivering secret messages sounds cool,” Eddie said.
“And remember,” I added, “we’ll all be on the company board of directors.”
“Okay, put us down for that drone thing,” Eddie agreed. “As long as we are going to be the chief drones.”
“Chief drones it is,” I said. “You’ll be drones number one and number two. Every other day you can switch numbers to make it fair.”
I wasn’t about to tell the Bogle twins that a drone was a male slave to the queen bee in a hive. Sometimes with little kids, the less they know the better.
Now that titles had been given out, I realized I had assembled the perfect team. I would be the heart, soul, and brains of the operation. We would count on Rob’s genius to come up with the idea that would make us a million dollars. Quinc
y, with her artistic ability, would help us tell the world about it. And the Bogle twins, well, they’d do the dirty work and other stuff that the rest of us didn’t want to do.
We were ready to take on the world.
“Quincy!” a voice called out.
“Crikey, it’s my mum,” Quincy complained. “Time for tucker. I hate to pike out, cobbers. Gotta bail. See you in a divvy. Hoo-roo.”2
“Wait a minute!” I stopped Quincy from climbing down the tree. “Doesn’t she know we’re having a company meeting?”
“How would she know?” Rob said. “The company didn’t exist ten minutes ago.”
“Look,” I told Quincy. “Just because your mom’s calling doesn’t mean you have to leave.”
“But she’s my oldie!”3 Quincy said. “Besides, I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse and chase the jockey.”
“Don’t you know anything about negotiations?” I told her. “When your mom says to come home, it doesn’t necessarily mean now. That’s just her first offer. Tell her you’ll be home in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes, Mum!” Quincy called fearfully.
“Good,” I said. “You gotta be tough to succeed in business.”
“Quincy! I need you home in five minutes!”
“See?” I pointed out. “Your mother didn’t need you home now. Tell her you’ll be home in eight minutes.”
“But—”
“Tell her!”
“Eight minutes, Mum!” Quincy yelled.
“Six minutes!” Quincy’s mother hollered. “Or we hop into the grub without you!”4
“See,” I explained to everybody. “You’ve learned the first lesson in business negotiations. Never grab the first offer they put on the table. Okay, I propose we adjourn this meeting. That means we go home and eat.”
“I have a question,” Eddie said, raising his hand as if he was in school.
“Yes, drone number one?”
“What is the GRQ Club going to do?” Eddie asked. “Doesn’t a company have to do something or sell something? How are we gonna make money?”
“An excellent question,” I told Eddie. “Now I see why we gave you the responsibility of being chief drone. Let’s meet back here tomorrow afternoon. Put on your thinking caps. We’ll come up with a master plan to make a million dollars.”
5
A Million-Dollar Idea
There’s an old, weather-beaten gazebo out in the field behind my house. I thought this would make a good office for the GRQ Club. Of course, once we got rich, we would buy a real office building.
I brought along a stapler, some tape, paper clips, pens, a ruler, scissors, and a calculator. An office needs office supplies, right? I had a big metal box with a lock on it to keep all the stuff in. I also brought along a photo of Bill Gates, my hero and inspiration.
“Who’s the nerd?” Quincy asked when she saw me taping the photo up to the post.
“Bill Gates,” I told her. “He’s the richest man in the world.”
“Looks like a nerd.”
Quincy had made a couple of signs to put up too. The first one was a logo she had designed for the company. It looked like this:
I told Quincy she had done beautiful work. The second sign said:
“Piranhas live in water, gumby,” Rob said as he pulled up on his bike. “Not gazebos.”
“I know that,” Quincy explained. “But this will get them thinking, won’t it? Nobody can steal our company secrets.”
“We don’t have any secrets,” Rob said.
“Not yet we don’t,” I told them. “But soon we will. Good thinking, Quincy.”
Finally the Bogle twins showed up, carrying their silly box of dust. I sat everybody down on the benches and stood up to address them.
“I would like to call to order the first official meeting of the GRQ Club,” I began. “If any of the members are opposed, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.”
Everybody just sat there. The Bogle twins picked their noses.
“When we last met,” I continued, “we formed our company. We came up with a company motto. We established bylaws and assigned positions. Someday, when we’re all multimillionaires, we’ll think back to that lazy day when we started this whole thing. But for now, we need to come up with the way we’ll make a million dollars. Does anybody have any ideas?”
Everybody still sat there. The Bogle twins still picked their noses. It didn’t look good.
“I gotta pee,” Teddy finally announced.
“I know!” Quincy said. “I could design some grouse togs and we could flog them around town!”1
“It costs a fortune to manufacture clothing,” I told her. “We’d have to set up a factory overseas.”
“We could sell our old toys,” Teddy suggested.
“Nobody wants your old, broken, spit-up-on toys,” I said.
“I’ve got an idea,” Rob chimed in. “Let’s put an ad in the paper asking a million people to each send us a dollar. Then we’ll have a million dollars. We don’t have to make anything or sell anything.”
“That’s berko!”2 Quincy exclaimed.
“Okay, how about this idea,” Rob continued. “You know those little packs of ketchup they give out in fast-food restaurants?”
“Yeah…”
“You know how squishy they are?”
“Yeah…”
“I always liked squooshing them with my fingers. I could do it for hours.”
“Your point?” I demanded.
“I was thinking,” Rob said, “they should make pillows out of those things. You know, big ones for people to sleep on. We could start a company making ketchup-filled pillows. You could even microwave them so they’d be warm when you went to bed.”
Rob is a genius, but I didn’t want to be the one to tell him that was a dumb idea.
“You’ve gone round the bend, haven’t you?” Quincy asked Rob. “Microwaved pillows? Have you got kangaroos loose in the top paddock?”3
“It was just an idea,” Rob added sheepishly. “I never said it was a good idea.”
“I gotta pee,” Teddy reminded us.
“You should have thought of that before the meeting,” I told him.
“How about we write a rap song!” Eddie suggested. “Rappers make millions of dollars.”
With that, Eddie began to improvise a little rap song, and did a little dance as he sang it:
“I hate everybody, yes I do.
I hate you and you and you.
I hate your father and I hate your mother,
I hate your sister and I hate your brother.
I’d put you in the zoo, and then I’d say boo.
I’d throw you in a freezer till you’re an old geezer.
I could throw you off a cliff, and then you’d be stiff.
I’d dump you in a truck—”
“Zip up, sprog!”4 Quincy said.
It was obvious that we weren’t going to make a million dollars with any of these dumb ideas. There was a great idea out there somewhere, but we just hadn’t found it yet. I was getting frustrated.
“I’m up a gum tree,”5 Quincy said, sighing.
“We could wash cars, I suppose,” Rob suggested. “Or sell lemonade.”
“Wash cars?” I muttered disgustedly. “Sell lemonade? Are you joking? The key word in the Get Rich Quick Club is quick. You think you’re going to get rich quick selling lemonade for a quarter a cup? You think you’re going to get rich quick washing cars? You might as well wait around for a UFO to land in your backyard.”
When I said those words, Rob suddenly got this amazing look in his eyes.
6
Big Bikkies
Say that again!” Rob said excitedly.
So I said it again: “You think you’re going to get rich quick washing cars? You might as well wait around for a UFO to land in your backyard.”
“That’s it!”
Rob bounced up off the bench like he had springs in his feet. He paced back and forth as the
idea formulated itself in his head. We all watched him. You could almost hear the synapses in his brain firing like machine guns.
He had a wild, excited look in his eye. It was the same look that you see in the eyes of mad scientists and lunatics in movies when they are planning to take over the world. If this had been a cartoon, a giant light bulb would have been floating over his head. I had the feeling that he was going to come out with something totally brilliant.
“What’s it?” I asked.
“I just figured out how we can make a million dollars,” Rob announced enthusiastically. “It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s quick.”
“What? What? What?” we all begged.
“We’ll have a UFO land in our backyard!”
What a letdown! Here I thought Rob was going to come up with some brilliant plan, and he comes up with something as stupid as his microwave pillow idea. My heart sank.
“I hate to break it to you,” I told Rob, “but there are no UFOs. Even if there were UFOs, it’s not like you can just tell them where to land.”
“I know there are no real UFOs,” Rob said, still with a mischievous smile on his face. “But what if we made our own UFO?”
“Oh, choof off, Rob.” Quincy smirked. “You’re a fruitcake.”1
“I’m listening,” I said, trying to keep an open mind.
“Don’t you see?” Rob said excitedly. “We’ll make our own UFO, and take pictures of it!”
I thought about that for a few seconds. Then I realized he was right! Rob had a can’t-miss, slam-dunk, cash-the-check, million-dollar idea.
“You…are…a…genius,” I told him.
“It’s nothing, really.”
“No, I mean it, Rob,” I said. “Your brain has connections the normal brain lacks. You make Albert Einstein look like the dumb kid at school. This is the greatest idea since the invention of the wheel!”
The twins were still looking like they didn’t get it. So I laid it out for them.
“We’ll make our own UFO and shoot pictures of it. Then we’ll sell the pictures to all those cheesy newspapers they sell at the checkout line at the supermarket. We’ll shoot video of the UFO and sell it to sleazy TV shows. They love that stuff. Soon companies will be all over us offering to make UFO posters, UFO lunch boxes, UFO toys, UFO trading cards, UFO backpacks—”