Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s entrepreneurial spirit — and sense of humor — propelled him into business school, he told the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” revealing that his first job as a chimney sweep gave him a one-liner good enough to be admitted.
“I was looking for a job where I could move up fast and always stay in the black,” Burgum cracked to The Post’s Miranda Devine, recalling the application answer he submitted to more than half a dozen MBA programs.
“I swept the board and got into all of them,” he added, ticking off admissions letters to Stanford University (where Burgum ultimately received his MBA), Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago.
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“Because apparently everybody needed to have a chimney sweep in their incoming MBA class,” he ribbed.
The future North Dakota governor and Trump cabinet official started his chimney sweep company as a senior at North Dakota State University in the 1970s, in part due to the energy crisis spurred by the OPEC oil embargo.
“People were starting to burn wood again,” Burgum recalled.
“The price of oil doubled, and people couldn’t afford to heat their homes. … So, I sort of saw an opportunity.”
The side job also caught the attention of the Associated Press, which published a rugged profile of the NDSU undergrad.
“It had a picture of me sitting on top of a chimney, black and white photo, high above the ground,” Burgum described the article.
“It was about zero degrees Fahrenheit. Steam is coming out, there was ice everywhere.
“I took a photocopy of that, in the early days of photocopying, photocopied that, put it on top of my applications for the school,” he also said.
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“I knew nothing about the whole process [of applying for business school],” Burgum went on.
“And I’m pretty sure I would have gone zero for seven.”
Elsewhere, the interior secretary recalled that some homeowners expected him to put on his best faux-Cockney accent when he showed up at their door wearing a “top hat and tails.”
“That was part of the uniform, of course,” he explained.
“That’s the expectation. I mean, we had Dick Van Dyke and ‘Mary Poppins’. Everybody was expecting to have you show up that way. And people would ask me if I would sing the ‘Chim Chimney’ song [‘Chim chim cher-ee’].”
“I said, ‘I could,’ but I said, ‘You have to pay to do that.’ They’d say, ‘How much?’ And I said, ‘I charge double for the whole job.’
“So, I never had to sing, which was my purpose.”
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