By ALEX COSTELLO
His neighbor had offered him an age-old proposition: He asked Corey to mow his lawn for him.
Before long, Corey was cutting the neighbor’s grass once a week and cut the grass. Little did that neighbor, who has since moved, know that would spark entrepreneurial fire.
After a summer of mowing the lawn, Corey spent the winter shoveling walks, and making more money. By the following summer, when he was all of 11, he used the money he had saved to buy himself ... a bike? A Nintendo? Nope. A leaf blower.
"I said, OK, now that I have my own equipment, I can raise the price a little," recalled Corey, who is now 13. "So I was able to charge him a little more, because I owned my own equipment to do the cleanup."
Corey's landscaping business has grown since his modest start. He now has steady customers (about eight houses in his immediate area, with more being added all the time), his own lawn mower, a couple of uniforms and a handmade cart to carry his equipment in.
His parents have always known that he was a special child. "When we first moved in, he was about 4 years old, and he was always curious," said Corey's mother, Shery. "Whenever someone came to the house to do work, whether it was a plumber or a handyman or what, Corey would stand right on top of them and watch every little detail of what they did. And then, by the time they came back to the house for a second or third job, they’d know he was going to be there and they’d make him a little helper."
From a young age, Corey loved tools and making things. He asked his mother to go out to Toys-R-Us and buy him a toy weed whacker. He taught himself how to ride a bicycle, and would ride up and down his block, stopping in his neighbors' driveways and starting conversations with them.
"And before you knew it, all the adults in the neighborhood knew this kid," his mother said. "They used to call him the mayor of the block."
Corey has become the handyman in his house. Even his older brothers, Adam, 20, and Jordan, 18, will ask him for help with things. "If anybody around here needs help fixing something, I’m always the handyman," he said. "I just love helping people out with things."
There are times -- the demands on a busy business being what they are -- when he can’t get to a scheduled job for his landscaping business, known as "Corey's Landscaping." So he persuades one of his friends to put on a uniform and do the work. For that he pays them 25 percent of the fee, or $5.
"He made uniforms," said his father, Larry. "He has his own uniforms, [his friends] give them back at the end of the day, and he washes them."
These days, Corey's entrepreneurial drive is started to take him to more modern, and less traditional, places: He began working as a deejay a year and a half ago. The beginnings of that enterprise were as humble as those of his landscaping business. He and a friend saw a sign at a nursing home that was looking for someone to come in and entertain.
They thought that spinning records would be fun, because they both loved music. They were going to split the business, called Super Entertainment, 50/50. But when it came time to actually buy equipment -- speakers, lights, an amp, a mixing board -- Corey's friend didn't want to pay. So he now owns two businesses.
"... And I just took the business from there," Corey said. "And I really did not, in the beginning, have any jobs at all. I would just sit in my room playing with the stuff."
Since then, however, he has gotten himself a few jobs, and tries to promote himself through word of mouth, and also by postings on Craigslist, the popular Internet personals site.
Corey doesn't know exactly what the future holds for him, but he does know that it involved business, and maybe even design and architecture. "Also, I see Donald Trump as my big idol," he said. "I see him with these golf courses and everything, so I’m really looking forward to doing that."
As for Corey’s current success and his ambition, his father attributes it to three main factors. "I think, basically, what he really does is he looks, he watches and he listens," Larry Daniel said. "He doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but make it a better one."
Comments about this story? ACostello@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
