Billionaire Growth Strategies
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Watch it online first.
Well, this was an episode with surprising results, to put it mildly, and one which provides the second season with a strong start.
In a nutshell, successful residential real estate investor and car buff Pete Athans has sunk his entire life’s savings into a new used car concept. The problems with this move are two-fold. One, Pete doesn’t really understand the car business. Two, he has this very odd idea that a dealership should also be a neighborhood hangout where people will come to watch television and play video games instead of just buying cars.
The result is that he has sunk $4 million of personal funds into a money-losing concept that wastes about 95% of its retail footage. The interior of the building is a huge empty cavern with just three cars in a space that should hold twenty. There’s also a wing that serves as a lounge outfitted with leather furniture and wall-mounted flat screens TVs. This space could easily hold another ten vehicles.
Marcus Lemonis
I just watched the first episode of the second season of Marcus Lemonis’ The Profit about the Athans Motors dealership located outside Chicago. Judging by the episode and trailer it looks like it’s going to be a strong season.
Someone emailed me yesterday about the progress that Marcus has been making with the business from his very first episode. In it he acquired Car Cash an NYC based company that buys your used car for cash. So what has Marcus done with that single location business since becoming a partner with the two brothers?
The answer is that he’s taken the winning formula and duplicated it a few times.
Go ahead, and take a guess as to how many locations there are as of this writing.
No peeking.
Take a guess before clicking for more.
Talent Acquisition
What does a firm in need of additional talent do in a tight job market? Here’s how one company grew.
Shortly after completing my degree I went to work for a management consulting firm that specialized in helping technology companies with their financing and marketing challenges. Our firm ended up becoming an equity partner in a client I brought in. The client was an engineering consultancy that was evolving into a designer and manufacturer of electrical instruments.
Here’s business growth advice from John Paul DeJoria who has built two $2 billion companies since the 1980s.
True rags-to-riches stories are not as common as we sometimes like think, but the story of John Paul DeJoria is a bona fide example of one. At one point he was homeless and at another he was a member of an Los Angeles gang. Then in the early 1980s he launched a hair care products company, John Paul Mitchell Systems, with a startup budget of $700. On top of all that he’s a good speaker and story-teller. Here he is giving the keynote speech at the Stanford 2011 Entrepreneurship Conference.
Or anything else that matters.
No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.
Step one is to stop procrastinating and take the first step.
If you have a problem starting, read this two part series on how to overcome procrastination. The above quote is from part 2.
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