Almost everyone dreams of having their own small business. John, my cousin, is living the American dream – making profits out of possessing a chain of Chicago restaurants and being established as a flourishing owning a business. But he always say that getting there was very hard.

In our family, it has been a tradition of engaging into small business. My dad used to own a construction company while my uncle used to have a furniture shop, but during hard times, nobody had available work for me.

Not until John called me and gave me a job in his first restaurant.

John told me that time that he was able to convince some credible investors to put up the restaurant. Later on, I found out that he just got a small business license for himself. During our first month, all we did was just to clean until the restaurant is all ready to start doing business.

Nothing happened with our first week. It was a total disaster for our day of opening, with the power even going out for as long as six hours.

During the whole summer, all we did was to help the small business survive until I had to go back to school.

Persistence is the only secret that John had. All day and night, he just worked and worked without surrendering. It’s like tiny breaks that he collected to become one huge success.

He was even boasted in our local newspaper’s entertainment section and he even got to sponsor a league team for kids.

Soon enough, he was on his way to putting up his second restaurant, and then the third one. John’s career was indeed made up of hard work which made everything much sweeter.

Article by Van T and read more about him here.