On the job

摘要

It has been said that you created the commercial weather forecast industry. How did you come to sell that first forecast? My first client came about when I was a second-year grad student, because the local natural gas company called Dr. Hosier [Charles Hosier, Penn State dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at the time] and said, "We need somebody to provide daily forecasts over the next five days, each day. Is that possible?" They needed that in order to know what the demand would be for heating, so they would know how much gas they would have left over to sell to industrial plants. He passed me the phone number on the back of an envelope. I agreed to provide them forecasts for December, January, and February for $50 a month. So AccuWeather had $150 in annual revenue and we were off and running.