Matthew Nemerson, president and CEO of the Connecticut Technology Council, earned his first few dollars by partying.
Setting up parties, that is.
Nemerson and two of his buddies started their own business during their senior year in high school handling the set up, bartending and the clean up of private parties.
The three teenagers’ business flourished, thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign they developed; they purchased paid advertisements in the local shopper newspaper, placed flyers on automobile windshields at local shopping markets and hung posters in the markets as well.
Their enterprise was so successful that the three found themselves busy with engagements nearly every weekend throughout their senior year. “We thought that food service was the future,” recalled Nemerson.
The three were so successful that they had frequent return jobs for an aspiring political candidate who would one day successfully run for U.S. Senate. Nemerson remembers setting up for fundraising parties for a much younger and then-state Senator Joseph Lieberman, who one day would also run for vice president.
“We had events at his house in New Haven,” Nemerson recalled. “It was the early ‘70s and Lieberman was working his way up to attaining state leadership. He was a major political force in the state in those days and we were high school kids all interested in politics. It was great.”
Nemerson and another high school buddy got their on-the-job training for their own business by first working as bus boys and dishwashers at a popular North Haven steak house.
“Jobs were hard to find in the 70s,” Nemerson recalled. He earned minimum wage of $1.65 per hour for cleaning up tables and washing dishes. With his heart set on buying a 1967 Fiat, Nemerson remembers working double shifts on the weekends, sometimes 16-hour days on Saturdays, so he could save enough money to buy the car.
“My recollection is that we were working almost 60 hours, working double shifts on Friday and a double shift on Saturday,” he said. Tips added to his savings.
“We were learning how organizations were run, and about different cultures,” he said. “It seemed sort of natural to be hanging out in the kitchen and working with the other kitchen help. … It’s good to realize you are not better than anybody else.”
Today, parents have greater expectations about how their teenage children should spend their summers, he said, noting that most parents would prefer their children work at internships that could lead to a professional career.
“I look at my friends and they had experiences working in factories, construction. And I look at their kids: They are almost all working at software companies. … We are insulating our kids because we think it is giving them an opportunity.”
Nemerson said he learned a lot by working in the service industry as a teenager, enhancing his ability to get along with a lot of different people.
Working in the backroom with other workers, many immigrants, was an eye-opening experience for Nemerson, the son of a Yale University professor.
“It was a blast,” he said.
