Frontier Capitalism on Discovery Channel
I recently came across a television series on the Discovery Channel called Jungle Gold. In a nutshell, it’s about these two mid-thirtyish Utah real estate speculators who lost all of their money and then decided to go to Ghana to dig for gold. If you are looking for gold these days Ghana is still one of the best places on earth to do it in. It’s the Saudi Arabia of the metal, from what I hear.
Being broke, the two protagonists, Scott Lomu and George Wright, raise some seed capital from investors back home to fund their expedition and the excavators and other heavy equipment they will need. In the very first episode upon arriving at the acreage they’ve leased to mine, they discover that the Chinese are already mining it. Not only that but the Chinese have grim-looking armed guards staring the duo down. So they high-tail it back to town to appeal to the tribal chiefs for help. The old guys are surprisingly sympathetic to their plight but explain that since the Chinese have far more fire power than they do, there’s nothing to be done about it but go dig elsewhere.
Meshulam Riklis on the Use of Debt and Other Insights into Success
Meshulam Riklis is one of the modern era’s pioneers in the use of creative financing to acquire companies. He is also famous for coining such lines as “The effective nonuse of cash” and “Money is to look at, not to use.” They summed up his philosophy of hoarding cash to flaunt in front of bankers and other lenders while at the same time doing most of his empire building with debt financing. As the old joke goes, bankers are the most receptive to giving you money when you can show that you don’t need any.
Top Business Lessons from The Profit’s Marcus Lemonis
Marcus Lemonis may just be the best thing that’s happened to American entrepreneurship in a decade or more. I say this not only because he’s an inspirational rags-to-riches success story, but because he is showing us all how to put the fun back into business after almost two decades of Internet mania.
Indeed one could make the case that the Internet is guilty of two transgressions against business. First, it’s made building a business seem boring, relatively speaking, with its emphasis on coding and SEO maneuvering around Google. If your business career started before the World Wide Web arrived, you’ll know what I mean. Second, the Internet has sucked a substantial portion of America’s best and brightest talent away from producing things that people actually need or want into building bullshit “online platforms” whose sole purpose is to strip-mine your personal information and sell it to advertisers.
If it’s free, you’re the product, Poindexter.
Call me old school, but I will take an Elon Musk or Marcus Lemonis who build real businesses any day over a Mark Zuckerberg and clones who merely build glorified phpBB boards for the purpose of serving you up to advertisers.
How Conrad Hilton Built His Empire
This is well worth the 45 minute minute time investment because Conrad Hilton not only built a great hotel empire but lost it all a number of times over the decades. He always bounced back when lesser men were crushed. You can read about him at his Wikipedia page.
Click to watch.
Marcus Lemonis’ Growth Strategy for Mr. Green Tea
This was a another good educational episode for aspiring Marcus Lemonis types. Rather than being distracted by the issues of highly dysfunctional owners, Marcus was able to immediately get down to business with Mr. Green Tea’s management. In the Planet Popcorn and LA Dogworks episodes the audience was tipped off early through editing that the owners were going to be difficult to work with if not downright impossible. With Jacob Maarse Florists, the owner’s last minute on camera reneging on the deal and outrageous denial that Marcus had sunk well over $150,000 into his business came as a shock. We all knew that Hank had an immature streak in him early on but no one was expecting such a shocker of an ending. Thankfully with Mr. Green Tea we could get back to more interesting business lessons.
So let’s apply Marcus’ three-part system for analyzing a business: People, Product, and Process.
Recent Comments