Teenage Snow Business

Sam Rattner shares how he started his first business as a teenager running a snow removal operation with his friend Ilya Fedorovich (who later became David Dobrik's right-hand man).

"In high school I ran a snow removal business. We had hundreds of houses. I was learning what insurance is because some woman slipped on salt. I'm learning how to finance trucks to get plows. We did like $50-60K for the winter.

I couldn't drive, that was a big problem. Ilya only had his permit, I didn't have a license so we couldn't really get anywhere. There was no Uber, we didn't have debit cards, so we'd walk to Mundelein, the neighboring town, to look at plows.

What I learned from that is you could scale the business and do really well from a cash flow perspective because most people don't want to be in that business, or they're like 60 years old driving the same truck for the same commercial lots. But what I learned is there's no value, it can't scale that large. I was always interested in how big I could make something. If it's easy, there can't be any value in it. If anyone could just get into it, then there's inherently zero value long term if you want to build billion-dollar businesses."