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This is an updated excerpt from Joe Biel’s seventh book, Good Trouble: Building a Successful Life & Business with Asperger’s, detailing many mistakes that proved to be learning opportunities and the first 20 years of Microcosm Publishing.
During my second-to-last year of high school, a friend’s dad began paying me under the table to do deliveries for his Italian restaurant. Within a year it had turned into the best-paying job of my life. I earned $4 per hour to deliver pizzas and was making $10–20 per hour in tips on top of that. While the owner was a staunch Republican, the likes of which I hadn’t yet encountered in my short life, he was hugely influential in my understanding of business management and finances. He explained every decision he made and every action that his employees took in terms of the financial cost to him. From a clinical distance, he would tell an employee to put only one dollar’s worth of cheese on each pizza, as if they could visualize that as a measurable quantity as he could. He sang the praises of onions, which cost him only nine cents per pizza, while we charged the customer 99 cents. Then he raised the customer’s price to $1.09, citing increased supplier costs.
He referred to my sexuality as “confused” and would intersperse praise for President Reagan into a monologue about how his employees would get raises more quickly if we…