My business mentors
When I first started this business, there were four people who helped me immensely: Dave Ramsey, Tim Ferris, Mark Cuban, and Seth Godin. These were my mentors. I didn’t replicate their work, but I combined the ingredients and made something that worked for me. If you want to start a business, listen to these people. Study their blogs. Listen to their talk shows. Find them on youtube. Read their books. Read the books that they tell you to read.
This is what I learned from each one:
Dave Ramsey: How and WHY you should run your business debt free. Read his book “The Total Money Makeover” and listen to his radio talk show. Sign up for email updates (they send them so infrequently that I actually read them), and about once a month, they do a show focusing just on small business and they will send you an email to tell you when to listen (the shows are recorded and stored online, so you can listen at your leisure). The lessons you will learn are priceless. Learn from the stupidity of others.
Tim Ferris: He does an excellent job of describing how to remove yourself from the process of cash flow in his book. It’s about helping you run the business and not letting the business run you. Must read material if you want to actually enjoy running a business. His book and his blog are both excellent resources. He also explains the value of doing things uniquely (Scarcity creates value. DUH! Few people follow this, however. Everybody is just trying to copy each other. Lame-o.)
Mark Cuban: He has some excellent blog posts, and I really appreciate his story of how he got rich. He states, “The 2nd rule for getting rich is getting smart. Investing your time in yourself and becoming knowledgeable about the business of something you really love to do. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are. Find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it. Before or after work and on weekends, every single day, read everything there is to read about the business. Go to trade shows, read the trade magazines, spend a lot of time talking to the people you do business with about their business and the people they buy from. This is not a short term project. We aren’t talking days. We aren’t talking months. We are talking years. Lots of years and maybe decades. I didn’t say this was a get rich quick scheme. This is a get rich path.” I love his emphasis on the fact that gaining wealth is a process, and the learning and the lessons are more important than the destination.. This is SO crucial to understand, because it explains what I have believed even more and more as I have journeyed down this path: I could do it all again. It wasn't a stroke of luck. It was an opportunity, and I took advantage of it. Anybody who has ever done this knows that they can do it again. Once you learn to take a few pennies and make dollars, you can do it over and over and over. Not overnight, but it can be done. If you took away every dollar from Bill Gates, he would have more money than me within a year, because he knows the process and has learned the lessons. Finally, this blog post is a fantastic story about Mark's process of getting rich and making money. Spoiler alert: it wasn't by being a lazy bum.
Seth Godin: I heard of Seth because he is labeled as a marketing person, but his book Tribes is what really helped me take initiative. It is about taking the initiative to lead (one of my favorite quotes: “Leadership is not a position”). I was just a 27 year old math teacher, and though there were better and more-experienced math teachers who could have done what I did, I decided not to wait for permission.
