I think luck plays a VERY small part in one's success. My mother is a business development person in a bank. She solicits people for business loans to start new companies or build existing ones. Some of the ideas have limited potential - like the guy opening a paintball arena, or the guy starting a chiropractic office. They will never be worth $100mm because they are entering limited marketplaces. They might be the guys making themselves a good living but the won't ever be the super rich guy with a new G5 and a private island.
People always are looking for the quick buck. Whenever I've been out places in a nice car, one of the first questions is "wow what do you do?". When people learn about my business they invariably ask the same thing, which is "how did you manage to start that?", like there is some secret for starting a business that they are not privvy to. Truth is virtually EVERYONE is not willing to take a risk, is a quitter, and have no confidence in their abilities. Thats a fact and thats why they don't try - they have a defeatist attitude. I am the opposite. I know I can do things, I will never quit, and I take tons of risks that are calculated and for me, don't seem like big risks.
My strengths are that I envision things that I think "hey that would be cool" and then I have the comfortable-with-risk personality to make a go of it. PeterS has it too. I had an idea a few years ago for a license plate that was made of LCD material (like a digital watch) so it went dark when you flicked a switch. I envisioned a james bond type device to get out of speeding camera tickets. I didnt just think about it, I MADE it. I sold my Viper and took the money and spent $5k on a lease for a new office. I spent $35k on buying custom LCD film. I took on my brother as a partner and between us we learned how to build the electronics parts to make it work. We developed the mechanical parts to hold it and package it. I found a trade show in NYC and we went to the show and for 3 days we showed off our product. I hardly sold any. But I got the word out, and within a year I had sold a few hundred. It grew and grew and with more hard work (such as taking the income and folding it back into the business - running advertisements, talking to magazine editors and getting product reviews, etc), we were able to grow it and grow it. We were selling them by the 10 and 20, then by the 100-200, then by the 1,000. Not because I was lucky, but because i had the gonads to sell my property and actually risk that money.
There were no guarantees or sure path to success, it was hard hard work. It was 80+ hours of work a week for years. It was doing everything as cheap as possible - driving 1200 miles to a trade show because shipping the display was too expensive. It was having the balls and audacity to do things like take orders for 500 units and agree to ship in 4 weeks when we didnt even have stock of raw materials. Then getting a short term loan from a friend or a bank or a credit card and buying the parts and working 120 hours for 3 weeks to get it done and rush it to the airport on the last day to ship it overnight to arrive in time, or driving from Boston to Chicago all night to deliver an order that had to be there Monday and we missed the Friday shipping deadline.
It was having the guts to take the profits and buy machines that we needed and machines we would need in a year. It was not resting on laurels and going after MORE products and more ideas. We saw opportunities to do more stuff and we did it. I would develop something and call distributors and try to sell them on it. It was about having the guts to talk to a banker and BS my way into a larger LOC than I would usually qualify for, then taking the $$ and expanding the business. When we did $5k a month in total sales, people thought our little business was cute and a fun little toy. When we did $200k, they though it was impressive but we could barely pay ourselves $20k/yr each so they thought we were working so hard for no good reason. When we hit $500k a year they thought we worked harder than them just to take home $50k a year. When we were doing $200k a month and would sometimes make $20k on a busy day they thought it was a big risk and if it all came crashing down we'd be screwed (and we could have). When we did double that again, people started to think we must just have gotten lucky and maybe our parents gave us the company or we "lucked out".
haha! Not even close.
I've run on 3-4 hours of sleep more times than I can remember. I have stayed in the crappiest hotels, I've had to use the meagher cash I made at a trade show so that I could EAT that night or afford gas to get home. I've done things 99.999% of the populace would cringe at doing because it's so far removed from their comfortable 9-5 job at the big company. I risked everything I own more times than I can remember. I ignored countless people "advising" me that I was taking too big a risk, or rolling the dice too much, or saying I was chasing a stupid dream.
But our business has grown about 300-500% per year for the past 6 years. And the rate of growth is increasing, not decreasing. I want to do $100mm in sales within 5 years, and I want to do 10 times that in 5 more years. I have no shortage of ideas and the gumption to roll the dice and make it happen. Now that money isnt as much a problem as it was, I can get away from the day to day and get people to do things for me and take on bigger projects.
"But how did you come up with those ideas?"
They are in front of our faces every day. Some have the guts to do something about it, some don't.
What sort of thing am I talking about? I will give up one of my "future ideas" here. I see soldiers dying in Iraq from sniper fire or IED's. My idea is to create an armored robot (maybe take an armored vehicle like a Bradley) and outfit it with sensors and computers. It patrols the streets. It "hears" sounds like gunshots and with multiple sensors it can triangulate their location. If a gunshot comes in proximity to it, then it can triangulate the original of the shot and within fractions of a second it analyzes what sort of weapon it came from, it rotates a weapon in 3 dimensions (rotation + azimuth) and returns fire in fractions of a second. Doppler effect lets it know if it was incoming our outgoing fire and it can respond only to incoming fire. So imagine a column of troops going down a street. A guy pops up from a rooftop and takes a shot. Within 1/4second a .50cal bullet is on it's way back to the source of the shot and maybe in a few degree cone pattern (depending on distance) to spray the shot location with lead.
Would this help get enemy kills? IMO yes. Its do-able with current technology. We have laser targeting, face recognition, sound regocnition, very precise motion control, etc, etc. I have a friend in the military who brought the idea up to a couple of highly placed soldiers and they said that the army would very likely provide funding if a proof of concept could be developed. When I have time, I intend to start a military operations sub-section of our company to develop this project and hopefully get military funding to further the idea.
I gave away that idea to give an idea of the sorts of things I'm talking about. That one would take a few hundred thousand (doing it on the cheap) to R&D it. of course people here could steal the idea (even though I filed a PPA & RPA on it ) but the difference is not in luck or connections, its in the smarts to think of things, the tenacity and willingness to take chances to see it through.
Or, you can go to work 9-5 every day and maybe after 30 years get promoted to director of whatchamacallit. Or you may get laid off at 58yo from your senior manager position where you made $140k a year but find yourself unable to get a new job because you're old and overqualified.
Nah, screw that. for me, I work my a$$ off now so I dont have to later. My goals for the future is to buy my parents a nice house and after that, one for myself too. Other than that, my dream is to cut back to 30-40 hours a week by the time I am 35 and mostly retire by 40 or 45 (probably wont since I love what I do) but spend my time traveling, doing photography, learning things that have no financial impact on my life but that I just enjoy, maybe get into spec car racing (done some of it and its fun) and spend a lot of time with my family.
If I lost everything tomorrow, I wouldn't sweat it - money means NOTHING. If anyone thinks it will make them happy, it wont. Its never the money making you unhappy and money never makes anyone happy. Its a tool, nothing more.
For those who dream
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Originally Posted by B16a2 Civic
he has great taste...
