Billionaire Growth Strategies
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter
Here’s an article on one of the finest business minds out there today: Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Amazon will be around for a long time because it has a solid business model and provides real value in the market-place unlike companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Pinterest, and a host of others which are nothing more than facilitators for time wasting.
He’s a pro-customer, tightfisted risk-taker who is conditioning Wall Street to embrace his erratic earnings. If you’re running a business with high margins — watch out.
The Men Who Built America Course
The excellent new series from the History Channel has generated a lot of interest in The Tycoon Playbook. I started working on the Playbook back in late 2007 with the intention of creating a 400 to 500 page manual on how to buy small businesses. I then quickly decided to make it more interesting by adding in actionable tactics and strategies from the self-made tycoons of the past 160 or so years. This swelled up the course to almost 900 pages of actionable details.
History Channel’s The Men Who Built America
I recently watched the History Channel’s program Sun Tzu’s Art of War which in 90 minutes did, arguably, the best job of not only explaining the classic’s lessons but, more importantly, showing how they all dove tail together. If you have any interest in strategy, for business or war, watch the program.
The program reminded me of a controversy that raged back in the 1990s over whether or not, war was a valid metaphor for business. As I read the views of various business book authors I found myself sitting on the proverbial fence. Part of me felt that it was true that business is warfare minus the bloodshed but another part wanted to believe that it was a more gentlemanly affair. Over time I came to accept that business truly is war if you want to build anything significant. If your goal is to settle for running a small Main Street shop out in Springfield, you maybe able to get away with telling yourself that it’s not. The reason for business being war is that building anything significant requires that you upset the status quo and ruffle some feathers. This is going to generate push back from vested interests.
The Small Business Growth Strategies of Tycoons
Let’s get down to how tycoons make money in the deal-maker’s game of buying and selling companies. The big pay day comes when a company is finally sold. To sell a company at a profit requires that you increase its value while it’s in your possession. (Value creation is an ongoing topic in this course.) Increasing value entails growing the business to increase its value. In other words, you want to “fatten up the hog for market,” as they say in the agricultural industry.
Let’s take a look at why bigger is better when it comes to business.
Tinkham Veale II
The world lost a great tycoon this past week. Tinkham Veale II was 97. Mr. Veale started back in the 1960s and built a huge conglomerate from an office in a stable, as legend has it. By the mid-1990s, his empire enjoyed sales of over $10 billion and employed 36.000 people. He was both a wealth and job creator. Sadly, too many of today’s so-called tycoons only know how to create wealth by destroying other people’s jobs.
The Veale Growth Strategy
Here’s how Mr. Veale grew his empire.
Recent Comments