I am I’m Jack Turner I’m a retired entrepreneur from southwest Missouri I’m 86 years of age and the exciting thing about it is I have never had a paycheck I have always worked for myself and because of that there’s been many ups and downs through my my lifetime experience i was born in nineteen a 30 dirty terrible terrible depression of the 30s financial issues were absolutely horrible and with extreme difficulty we did survive and make it after a period of time my activities begin to become more successful and I just like to pause here and tell you something that we were on a farm and we have a a mother Hulk that had a whole lot of baby pigs and and she had more pigs and she had dinner plates one of which was extremely small and it was going to be a runt and my dad said it’s going to die and here i am just a young child and my father said son why don’t you take that pig and make a pit out of it and you know i did and that pig survived it grew up and the first thing you knew I got to sell my pic and it paid for my brand new bicycle and I as I look back now I realize that I became an entrepreneur at a very young age because now then what else can I do and I began to look forward to opportunities to have some cows and some more pigs and so forth in and with this driving force within me the first thing you know and on the farm i had saved my money and i had one hundred dollars in cash and i don’t know i was probably 14 or something like that my father said son I with that hundred dollars i think i could buy you 10 sheep to put with my sheep and i thought well that’s a good idea and so I got my sheep and we shared oh and I got the money that’s all right and then the next thing had happened I had lambs and I didn’t have ten lambs I had a whole lot of lambs because they had twins and wow when i sold my lambs I got a whole lot more than my hundred dollars back so now then that is absolutely a real winner for me and I became inspired at that point what can i do to acquire additional livestock and so forth my father did make it possible for that to happen and now that i’d like to go ahead and say that eventually i begin to make enough money and i had only one car one of the only two cars in a whole high school and I guess what don’t you think I didn’t have a lot of fun one problem i forgot about school and when I got ready to graduate I had had so much fun my teacher says you’re not going to graduate and what can I do it scared me I didn’t know what to think and she gave me an assignment of work if you’ll hand it in to me after the graduation ceremony is over I will give you the smallest grade which will give you a credit and make it possible for you to graduate now then I guess what I thought that’s a pretty good deal frankly I wasn’t sure I’d even do it but you know what that teacher passed away before i got that accomplished now then let me go ahead and tell you this i have always had a driving desire to be successful and all of a sudden when i realized that i nearly flunked out a out of school what i need to do something about that i began to try to improve everything as involved in especially in the farm and i studied everything I could for the Agricultural University of our state and I became somewhat successful in the management of our farm and time goes on and all of a sudden we have a very difficult if it happened all of a sudden in the 50s we had grouse we had grasshoppers we had bugs we had floods it was terrible and all of a sudden I became discouraged and I would like to do something else and guess what my my because I’d almost flunked out of high school my father had told me there’s a couple of things that I’d only be able to do because of my lack of knowledge and and my experiences in school and you know what that made me angry and put a driving force in me and momentarily of all things I get drafted for the Korean War and when I got out I was somewhat convinced maybe he’s right maybe I cannot accomplish things that will help me to go forward in my in my vocational life so I did quite well in a military and I got out and I’ve got to enroll in the university well want to enroll in the university guess what I flunked all the entrance exams now what I had to take remedial courses not for credit and my wife I could recall sitting in a bathtub else you’d be teaching me spelling words and teaching me things of that nature you know but with determination I did eventually find myself able to enroll in college and in the empty Missouri University there and one of the courses that I ran into was retail merchandising and the first thing you know we had acquired a small Ben Franklin store it’s a it’s a dime store in other words a very tiny walmart type store and guess what time I paid all my bills I had almost no money left what am I going to do I have no money but yet I was able to get one hundred percent loans and we did move forward in the store I remember being it was so complicated financially that we literally raised our three daughters on bologna sandwiches and peanut butter and but the thing about it was I had now proved to myself that knowledge is a very valuable thing because now i’m studying how you can be a better retailer how I can be a better and in every area of my life and and I have developed the phrase that knowledge is power and so I began to be hungry for anything that would relate to improvement in my awareness and I determined her discovered rather that that I had rather go to schools I had to work so I begin taking courses not for credit I begin to enroll in every conference in every every issue where there would be an opportunity for learning and eventually I became a landlord and there i joined all the conferences that i could find in organizations associations anyway i can do to accomplish more knowledge and i want to tell people right away my lack of knowledge in my beginning days was a very a terrible thing to me and I begin to go forward then I have developed a passion passion if you please because I have experienced both sides and I am encouraging people if you please to acquire knowledge join every conference you can and to be an entrepreneur or a person who is able to go forward you must acquire information and knowledge to be a better person and this I have made a discovery all of these issues that I’m talking about I had suddenly found they were actually in my Bible in the book of Proverbs I was surprised to see that that book was telling me how to be successful and I began to read my Bible and as I did I begin to find out that it was telling me acquire knowledge to be a person of integrity to guard your finances to seek counsel and it one thing it even warned me about do not cosign for anyone unless you’re willing to pay the bill by point is this the more knowledge I have acquired the more opportunity I have to serve people