The Mistletoe Millionaires

We made several hundred dollars, but the lesson has paid back dividends for decades.

One December during my freshman year at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA my newfound friend “DP” and I found that we faced a problem familiar to college students everywhere.

We were flat broke.

Not “skip a nice dinner” broke. More like “beer, pizza, Christmas gifts, and common sense are all competing for the same twenty-dollar bill” broke.

Fortunately, I knew something all other students didn’t.

Scattered throughout the beautiful campus setting were giant blue oak trees. The ones near the rugby field on had mistletoe.

Lots of it.

As a kid, I had learned what it looked like, where to find it and how people were willing (I assumed) to pay for it, at least during the holidays. I pitched an idea to DP.

Let’s climb the trees, cut some of the mistletoe, bag it up, and see if somebody will buy it.

To his credit, he didn’t laugh.

DP asked me. “Aren’t we also going to be killing these trees if we do this?”

“Nope, the mistletoe is actually a fungus that weakens the limb it grows on.”

That same weekend we were up in the trees cutting branches, hauling them down, and stuffing smaller triangular pieces into Ziploc bags. We even gave each buyer a thumbtack in the bag.

We figured if everything went perfectly, maybe we’d make fifty bucks “each” before Christmas.

That seemed ambitious enough.

Then I started walking into boutique wine or cheese shops, restaurants and small clothing stores around town.

Our sales pitch was hardly sophisticated.

“Hello, we are two college freshmen trying to make enough money to buy Christmas presents”.

Most said no, they had good reasons. They would explain that there were accounting issues, tax issues, paperwork issues, one even said “Is this ok with the Food and Drug Administration?” “What the, HUH?

One finally said yes.

They gave us a little space near the cash registers where customers could grab a bag of mistletoe as an impulse purchase on the way out of their store.

The price was three dollars.

Then something happened that neither of us really expected.

A few days later, I dropped into see the owner and the store had sold out. I asked if we could bring more.

I still remember that moment.

Until then, it had been a funny idea filled with thoughts of people kissing under a couple of twigs of fungus!

Now it was a business.

For the next few weeks, we kept harvesting, bagging, delivering, collecting money, and restocking inventory. A couple of days before Christmas, we had made several hundreds of dollars, far beyond anything we thought possible when we started.

The money was nice.

The lesson turned out to be worth far more to me. You cannot wish and dream for nice things if you're not willing to face some rejection.

Most people think opportunity arrives looking like a brilliant invention or a perfectly crafted business plan.

Sometimes it arrives hanging from a tree.

The mistletoe had been there all along. Hundreds of students would see it every day without giving it a second thought, because they had no idea where mistletoe came from. Maybe they were not from families that told their students “…financially, your mostly on your own to make it through college”.

The opportunity wasn’t hidden.

It was simply unnoticed.

Looking back, that little Christmas business taught me something that still applies to investing today. Valuable opportunities often exist long before anyone recognizes them. The challenge is not finding opportunity. The challenge is training yourself to notice what everyone else walks past.

Sometimes the market rewards the people willing to look straight up.

The information shared here is for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflects personal experiences and opinions. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and no outcome can be guaranteed. Always do your own research and make decisions based on your individual goals and circumstances.