Chapter 6
The Friends and Family Plan
Essential Idea: Get the Money You Need from Your Extended Clan
It is January of 1980, and the unemployment rate is a whopping 7.5 percent (and soon to soar above 10 percent). Inflation is an even more astounding 13 percent. Undoubtedly it is the worst economy in 50 years. Against this bleak backdrop, two out-of-work journalists have an epiphany one night that changes their world, and that of their closest friends and family members too.
Chris Haney and Scott Abbott loved to play Scrabble, and with plenty of time on their hands (being out of work and all), Scrabble they played. One night they pulled the game out of the closet and discovered that one of the tiny alphabet tiles of their set was missing. So Haney and Abbott hopped in the car and headed off to the toy store to buy another Scrabble set.
And then it hit them—they had bought a lot of Scrabble games over the years, and there had to be a lot of other people who were doing the same thing every day. Even better, they surmised, in a bad economy people were looking to save money by entertaining at home. What they needed to do, Haney and Abbott decided, was to invent a new board game. And they even thought they had a great idea for one.
That there had not been a new board game invented in many, many years did not deter them. (Scrabble and Monopoly were about it at the time.) But the two friends faced other problems—both initially and over the long haul. The main one was that they were broke ...
