How Rupert Murdoch Built His Empire
My past consists of a series of interlocking wars. – Rupert Murdoch
Whether you love him or hate him, you have to admit that Rupert is one of the great disruptors and newspaper magnates of the past 65 years.
How did Murdoch get started? It’s an interesting story as all tycoon stories are.
Murdoch inherited a small newspaper after his newspaperman father died in 1952. Rupert was only 21 years old. The newspaper served as his grubstake and he took to building it with a great passion which in turn inspired his staff to give him their best. Within a few short years Murdoch was engaged in an aggressive acquisition campaign to control additional newspapers across Australia. This period included his war with the Packer family for dominance in newspapers. In 1968, he started acquiring British newspapers and in 1973 American ones. According to the book All the Money in the World:
Then he maneuvered his way around the world with a fistful of loans and a remarkable ability to seize opportunities and build major media properties from scratch. Every acquisition Murdoch made was financed by mortgaging his properties to buy new ones.
Here’s a one hour BBC documentary on his life.
Warning: Spoilers ahead. Watch first.
A. Stein Meat Products
Most tycoons develop a business growth strategy for a particular industry and then stick to it. Not our hero Marcus Lemonis. Cars, cleaning products, popcorn, flowers, dog kennels, etc. he’s open to them all. The reason for this is that Marcus has developed expertise that’s transferable across industries. Specifically, he has a solid grasp of both finance and marketing. He knows enough about finance to be able to figure out the appropriate financial fix for a business. (If he needs to, he brings in a specialist as we have seen at least a couple of times now.) He also understand the basics of developing national brands. (Once again, he brings in specialists to design the logos and other details that constitute a brand.) If you watch a similar show called Hotel Impossible you will see the expert also relying on specialists to handle the details. No one needs to be an expert at everything. You just need to be able to pull together the right team in most cases. In some ways these guys are like a really good concierge in that they put you in touch with the right specialists.
Marcus Lemonis talks openly about he makes his money with Michael Burt. Marcus’s goals are to make money and save jobs.
This is very good!
Please start at min 16 when the fashionably late Marcus finally arrives.
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.
Recent Comments