Jordan clerked for two years in the dry goods store of William P. Tenney & Co. before working for another merchant named Pratt. At age nineteen, one of Boston's leading merchants, Joshua Stetson, "appreciated his ability, and offered to assist him in starting business on his own account." At twenty-five he sold his thriving store and went to work for J. M. Beebe, who taught him "not only a practical knowledge of the principles, methods, and in the management of a great business enterprise, but of the system which Mr. Beebe had perfected only after twenty-five years of close and assiduous labor and study."
