I have been in a few of these places — meaning I have been able to say I turned a failing business into a success, I have had to close a once prosperous business that no longer could find a reason to survive in a changed world, I have been a part of startups that have become successful and a few that could never quite get off the ground. Also, don’t miss the key word ‘owning’ in the title of this story. The experience of owning is a much higher reward, and higher risk, proposition than ‘running’ or ‘working for.’
I do not, fortunately, get much hate mail but it does come in occasionally. This snip is from almost three years ago (cheap digital storage makes finding good memories and bad memories just as easy):
As a prior employee of both of your father’s legacies, Captive Plastics and Lincoln Mold, just wanted to say that although you may carry his name you’ve sold out any claim to his righteousness. Your father was a great man while you were just a bean-counter. — (name withheld)
A lot of people seem to want to be the owner and “boss” but few understand what that really means. For the Captive Plastics reference it meant either signing my name to the $800,000 personal guarantee in place to a very unhappy bank after my father passed away or having them simply call the loan that was already in trouble. From my perspective, with almost nothing in my personal bank account — what’s another $800,000 going to mean on the short ride to zero? Basically I was all in whether I wanted to be or not and one of the first things I did at the time was reduce my salary to $1,000 a year. Yes, that’s not a typo. Assuming a weekly pay, my pre-tax income was a stunning $19.23 a week — why bother? I still needed medical coverage and this was the best way for me to achieve that. For those that are unclear on the timing the unhappy bank and failed performance were in place before I took over the business when my father passed away — so, yes, my personal mourning period needed to be put on hold as well.
When Lincoln Mold got in trouble it was a much smaller business that, despite years of trying to pivot, could never seem to find a new path to profitability. During those years of no profitability I stopped taking any income from the business. Thankfully the successful turnaround of Captive Plastics gave me the ability to cover the over $1,000,000 in liability of the defined benefit plan. This was true even after selling off all of the assets of the business, including the real estate, and using those proceeds to pay down the debt. Writing this now I am realizing, just from the ‘bean-counter’ perspective, this situation was a lot worse in magnitude than the first one I was in nearly 20 years ago. With no hope of a turnaround I would have been living a much different life now if I did not have the bank account to cover that liability.
9. When we want entertainment, we go to places with no admissions. Parks and friends houses. I never knew how many great parks there are in my area until we had no money.
10. If a vital appliance breaks, we (my wife and I) become that appliance. I am now an expert dishwasher with a John-Henry-like ability to outdo even the most advanced dish cleansing apparatus! Though I suspect using a lot more water.
11. Any new big items we make ourselves. I’m making my son his first bed because, it seems, the littler the bed the more expensive. Lumber is cheap.
12. Invest in caffeine drenched products. I get up early to spend time with the kids and go to sleep late dealing with household stuff (some mentioned above).
13. Become an expert at the budget. Luckily, my wife handles this. As the author mentioned for #8, sometimes people will be payed later because that’s the only option.
#7 is still somewhat of an issue given the general level of exhaustion for the both of us. However, we’ve had some luck with strict scheduling. Though this too may well not be enough when, for example, one of us falls asleep reading to the kids. Kids beds and rocking chairs can be surprisingly comfortable and the mate knows it’s just better to let the other sleep than to stick to an intimacy schedule.
You do all of the above and if you get it right — be it a startup or a turnaround — the rewards can be huge. Huge as in a large section of the population would call them unfair.
You do all of the above and if you get it wrong — be it a startup or a turnaround — and the consequences can be devastating. If Captive did not turnaround to profitability it would have been personal bankruptcy. Even if I managed to get out of that hole there would have been most likely no way to get out next one Lincoln Mold would turn into just 20 years later.
Either way, while you are doing it life is hard. You need to find someway to either like, or at least tolerate, getting punched in the face all of the time. I didn’t go the egg route but rice and boxed Kraft Mac & Cheese became my best friends. Vacation only happened when the flames went down low enough so there was only smoke visible — and with that only as far as the car could take you with a few hours of driving providing you did not stay too long. Bottom line is being in failure mode or startup mode is not a sustainable place to be. Yes, there are dim bulbs in the leadership sphere that try to live the highlife as Rome burns but let’s discount those special kinds of stupid for this story.
Circuit City was founded in 1949 and 60 years later it was liquidated in Chapter 7. In some ways a business is like a life — some days are better than others but everyday forward is also one step closer to your death. Business has the fortune, through the right leadership, to keep pushing the span of its life further and further out. Kodak, Polaroid, Blockbuster, Borders, Tower Records, Circuit City, Pan Am, DHL, Eastern Airlines, Lionel Corporation, RCA, E.F. Hutton, Compaq, TWA, Arthur Andersen, F.W. Woolworth Company, Enron, Bear Stearns, etc, all got into trouble for various reasons. (Did you know Foot Locker is all that survives from F.W. Woolworth Company?) What about companies like Wesabe, Color, Pay By Touch, SearchMe, Joost, Cuil, Boo.com, Reactrix Systems, Spiralfrog, Friendster, etc? The list of startups that fail is far longer than mature companies that go out of business but the main difference is they have not been around long enough for most people to remember who they were even though their history is far more recent.
Luck helps a lot and the brutal fact of entrepreneurship is its not for everyone. It cannot be taught, it is a tough road, and the odds are so much against you that for those who try most are self-selected out quickly. You need to be in a place of total responsibility for the outcome — be it good or bad — while at the same time have the brutal self awareness to know what you suck at and where, and how, to call in for help. If you catch someone doing it right, do take the time to thank them for making it past the odds and supporting the lives of the so very many they touch.
The only thing, that will change your life, change your business, change your money, change your relationship, is you must raise your standard. Now I know that sounds boring, stupid, basic, but it’s the truth.
The only thing that changes our life long term is when we raise our standards. What does that mean? That sounds so boring and dumb. It means that all of us in life have things we want. We don’t get what we want, we get what we have. Remember what I said earlier, we all get what we tolerate in ourselves and other people, but when you’re no longer willing to tolerate something that’s when your life changes. The difference in people is their standards, period. The difference in people is their standards, period, and what do I mean by standards? Everyone in the world has a list of things they think they should do. I should lose weight. I should work out. I should spend more time with my kids. I should work harder. I should make more calls. I should. I should. I should. I should, and then you know what, people don’t do their shoulds, and they get mad at themselves, and they what I call “should all over themselves.” They beat themselves up about it. What changes people is when you’re should becomes a must. When suddenly the thing you said should happen has to happen. That’s when human beings change. It’s like, if you want to take the island, and you’re the head of the Army, the most powerful way to take the island is to burn the boats, because if there’s no way to go back it’s amazing what happens when it’s a must to do something versus the should. That’s what makes human beings succeed. — Tony Robbins
It took five weeks for the US Marines to capture the island of Iwo Jima. It took me a lot longer to change my own life and thankfully without anything close to that amount of risk. My Tony Robbins story is a long one that started with a visit many years ago from a high school classmate. We graduated MIT together, class of 1986, and it was he himself who used to joke that the only reason he was accepted to MIT was the need to make a quota for a specific minority. Now he is standing in front of me telling a story of how he is living on a boat in Hawaii while helping to turnaround businesses. What? …and that I should look into the teachings of this guy called Tony Robbins who wrote a book called Unlimited Power. What the what?
It was intriguing enough to make me go out and buy the book after which it promptly sat in my closet for the several years that followed. Somewhere in between the subject of Tony Robbins came up in reference to the things we should be doing in human resources at the family business where, for the most part, further discussion was dismissed because he was largely thought of charlatan by the head of HR.
In the years that followed I was faced with my own business turn around and the interim COO I brought in at the time wanted to go down to Florida and attend one of Tony’s seminars called UPW to “see if there are any chinks in this guy’s armor.” He wanted me to go with him and my health was not in a position where I had the energy to even make that move, but, okay, I get it, it was time to read the book. Which I did and if you are wondering my COO came back with only praise for what he experienced.
Though I do not remember any details of the book exactly, I know got sucked in deep enough to order the Personal Power CDs (they were probably on cassette at the time, and, yes, they were probably purchased from one of those infamous late night TV infomercials that the “the guy with the big head and big teeth” was running constantly in those days) and that is where the momentum started to build. Going through nearly all of the program with deep dive attention it was like I literally woke up from being asleep for most of my life. It was a year or two later when I finally made it down to, coincidentally Florida again, to attend my first UPW seminar where my journey with Tony truly began in the full technicolor glory that I describe going to a live event is as compared to the B&W silent movie version of the multimedia products.
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn
To say I raised my standards may be true but more precisely I no longer accepted standards that were lower than I what I knew now I was capable of achieving. I believe Jim Rohn’s statement to be true with the only change of adding yourself to that average. In other words, before the people you spend time with can lift you up you need to change yourself. I should lose weight — starting with what I am putting into my body. I should be more financially secure — starting with wasting less time on Facebook and in front of the TV. I should make more of my life — starting with investing in the talents within me. You all ready have people supporting your existing standards. If you don’t you wouldn’t be where you are today. If you are not happy with where you are start with yourself. Raise those shoulds into musts. Then look for the people who might be just outside of your existing circle for help. You already know who some of them are. Reach for their hand to get out of the hole and they will in turn lead you to others that will take you even further. I, myself, would not be in a position to have written any of these Medium stories without going through this process and for anyone who asks, and for a lot that don’t, I tell them I have Tony Robbins to thank for starting me down that road.
“Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.” — Leo Buscaglia
As a side note, one of the most memorable experiences of going to UPW for the first time was seeing the range of people that were changed by the experience. One person described himself as only being alive because he decided to go to the event rather than use the gun in the nightstand to kill himself. Others had very successful lives who wanted to take them even further. For myself, all I knew is that something more was waiting for me in this life. I didn’t know what it was but I wasn’t looking to waste another year ending up in basically the same place I started with the only progress being one less year left to do something about it. I also had the simple perspective that if someone could use these strategies to turn around a life that was close to being ended from one’s own hand — imagine where I could go starting from a place seemingly already much further ahead. Now almost 20 years later I am living a life I could not even have dreamed of back then and I mean this literally. One day I am going to find that original workbook from the seminar and wonder to myself if I would could even be friends with the person I was back then. Yes, today I would still reach down the hole to try to lift my former self up but the real question in this intellectual trip is would my former self have taken that hand to get out? Without the help of Tony Robbins, sadly the answer would probably have been “no.”
There was an article on WebMD ten years ago entitled, “Is Alcohol a Truth Serum?” It centered around a controversy at the time where someone made anti-Semitic remarks during a drunken tirade. Though the article did seem to draw a line between alcoholic behavior and social drinking the punch line still remained:
Alcohol can’t make you think or feel things — Gary L. Malone, MD
Meaning, at least for the social drinker, alcohol is indeed a truth serum because somewhere inside you need to believe the thoughts you express when drunk. More practically one can argue that everyone has beliefs that, if released without inhibition, would cause us to add ‘mea maxima culpa’ to the end of a good portion of our sentences. So, is ‘who we are’ answered by everything we think or what we end up actually doing?
I believe we need faults to evaluate and adjust our actions. We need faults for perspective, measurement, and oddly enough sympathy. The real question, however, is are the faults supporting who you are and what you do, or are they being held back with a wall just to fit into whatever the social norm is that surrounds you. Perhaps it is this latter case where alcohol crumbles that wall and exposes what you want to do as if no one is watching.
So, how does this relate to money? I believe in the exactly the same thing as Gary Vaynerchuk when he says:
There is no such thing as ‘selling out’, or fame, or money, or more eyeballs on them, changing anyone. It is very simple. The more eyeballs, the more attention, etc, exposes who you are.
With money comes power. Power does not corrupt; it just allows you to do more of what you want to do. The mainstream media (meaning all of the Constant Negative News networks out there) tend to make us think most people who have a lot of money are all a bunch of drunken assholes. Yes, I am sure everyone knows that person who is an embarrassment to be around when they have had one too many — however, for most of us what comes out of our mouths under the influence is no different than what we speak sober. Most millionaires are completely invisible — they truly are the millionaires next door. If there was ever an analogy to the alcoholic with money it is probably the case where money comes too quickly into place without the work or knowledge to deal with it. A prime example of this is winning the lottery, either literally or through the luck of being a truly overnight success, which is an exceedingly rare instance.
My challenge to you, assuming you believe money corrupts people, is to think about another possibility. That is, the possibility where, in those cases you are using as references, the corruption was there before the money.
People that know my background from the rigid plastic packaging industry sometimes shake their heads trying to figure things out when I tell them my ‘day job’ in now in the feature film industry. (For those plastics nerds reading this, ‘film’ is not referring to flexible packaging — no, it means movies — as in entertainment) “Oh, so you got a new hobby,” some have said. Ah, no. Though I do not tell them directly my thought is to help build a bigger business than what I left behind in manufacturing. For those still listening the question that comes up almost all of the time is, “Do I miss it?” The answer I give comes with a pause — how do you describe something that you truly valued and are grateful for while at the same time not missing it?
The manufacturing business was not just a business I owned but rather a family business my father started and I took over after his passing. When it achieved a level of success I felt I could not take further it was time to leave. I am grateful for the people that became a part of my life along the journey and obviously for the resources it created to continue down a different path ahead.
If you are an assembly line worker and love your job then you probably do not understand what I am talking about. I cannot imagine doing the same thing day in, and day out. Yet, if I am brutally honest with myself there is a level of abstraction where I am probably doing just that. I may have had no love for plastic packaging but I certainly enjoyed building the business — finding the people, capital, and strategy needed to make it grow into something my own father would have never imagined. To a great degree I am still doing the same thing, just in different industries now with the film investment being the one I hold closest to my heart.
It’s more fun, in the most serious existential sense.
“Jack of all trades, master of none” is an artificial pairing.
In a world of dogmatic specialists, it’s the generalist who ends up running the show.
Boredom is failure.
Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence instead of fear of the unknown.
Thus, is it really being a ‘Jack of All Trades’ in the end or just being a miserable failure of labeling what you are good at that is the real truth? In other words, if you think you are a specialist could you be missing out on a larger picture to which you fit in just as well? Either way, the push towards a ‘gig economy’ is here and it is growing. As terrible as the thought is of finding something new, after doing the same thing over and over again for literally an entire career’s time, it is also becoming easier. The challenge, as with many things in life, is usually more of a mental shift than a lack of ability. Take that challenge, conquer it, and you just might find — as I have — the thrill of being born someone new again.
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” ― Confucius
I was listening to a Derek Sivers Q&A on the Tim Ferriss podcast and he talked about the interesting concept to which this story is entitled.
Look at running.
If you talk with people who hate running, you’ll hear them say, “Ugh. First you have to get your running clothes, and get dressed. Then you have to put on your shoes, then lace them up just right. Then you have to stretch, and warm up. Then afterwards you need to cool down, then shower. It’s such a pain!”
But if you talk with people who love running, they’ll say, “You just pop out for a quick run.” If you ask them about the steps involved, they’ll say there’s only one: just run.
So knowing that we have this human nature to think of things we like as simple, and things we don’t as complicated, you can use this to deliberately simplify how you think of something you’re avoiding, making it more appealing.
An ultra-marathon is simple: you just run 100 miles to the end. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy!
Success in business can be simple: find a need that people are proving they are willing to pay for, then find a profitable way to solve that need for them. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy!
Notice (in your mind) when your complications are holding you back. Turn the dial towards simplicity, so you just jump out the door and start running.
Notice (in your results) when your simplified approach is holding you back. Perhaps you’re using only one tool in the toolbox, and need to learn others.
And as for all the business advice out there, well, if information was the answer then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs. So really you, yeah you listening to this, you need to shut that shit off, put your blinders on, get out the door and start running. (Metaphorically speaking, that is.)
So, how does this relate to Bulletproof coffee? If you are living under a rock and have not heard of it yet by brand name you might have at least heard about crazy people putting butter in their coffee. The concept of being bulletproof, however, goes far deeper than that. The key ingredients are four items:
You can talk about all of the benefits — why the specific oil, what makes grass fed important for the butter, what makes the branded coffee different (especially in the United States), and even get people to taste it and have them find it surprisingly good. You can go further to talk about the results — no brain fog, no crash, mycotoxin free. Then, however, when you talk about the process the look and the comment that comes back from most is, “Oh, I would never have time to do that!”
So, notice (in your mind) when your complications are holding you back. Turn the dial towards simplicity, so you just jump out the door and start — in this case — brewing. Notice (in your results) when your simplified approach is holding you back — in this case your body is crashing, you have brain fog, etc. Perhaps you’re using only one tool in the toolbox, and need to learn others.
