12-Year-Old Makes Deal of a Lifetime for His Dad’s 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302
By his own admission, Matt Jennings acted like a “knucklehead” as a pre-teen, spending more time messing around with friends than he should have. Young Matt was smart, though, and had a solid work ethic.
“I was always enterprising,” he says. “I was the kid who always set up the lemonade stand. When we had to sell stuff for school, I was always top of the list.”
At age 12 in 1982, decades before he would be leading multinational companies through digital sales strategies, Matt made one of the best deals of his life. Learning that his father, Chuck Jennings, was planning to sell the 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302 he’d bought new, the boy objected.
“I told him, ‘You can’t sell that car,’” Matt recalls today. “And then Dad made a deal. He said, ‘Graduate from college, then you can have it.’ He was trying to motivate me to be more responsible.”
For a kid not even in high school, 10 years was nearly another lifetime into the future. Time, however, has a way of passing quickly in high school, where Matt did well. He then studied business at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and, when he graduated in 1992, his parents kept their promise …
(photo credit: Chuck and Matt Jennings)
