In my early 20s, I was working for a big company in Rochester NY and getting my MBA at nights at University of Rochester – Simon Business School.
I had a great management job (I was making $100K+ per year, $250K+ in today’s dollars) in the corporate world and I wasn’t 25 yet. I was learning a lot and thankful for the skills and opportunities and the mistakes I was making on somebody else’s dime.
Yet, I didn’t feel fulfilled in my work for someone else. I had dreams of going out on my own.
In Rochester, I was fortunate to have met two of the Paychex founders (Tom Golisano and Gene Polisseni) that would grant myself and another friend an audience and listen to our “business plans”. They guided us in life lessons and didn’t throw us out of the room when we would then ask them to invest lots of $$$ in our grandiose plans.
Looking back, they were incredibly patient mentors while I was clueless on how to get started.
After they listened, this is what they would say:
“While your business plans may have merit, we are declining to invest.”
Here is what we did and we think you should do also:
Go home, stand in front of the mirror, look at yourself and ask:
• How much money of your own can you risk to invest? Is it enough to get the business off the ground and start acquiring customers and revenue?
• Are you ready to go without a paycheck until the business makes enough money to pay yourself?
• Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed and never ever ever give up?
• You have the best chance of succeeding if you find a recurring revenue product/service that people have to buy in a big market. Is your recurring revenue stream scalable/franchiseable? Recurring and predictable revenue is huge.
• While you have worked primarily in one industry thus far, your business skills are transferable across industries and products/services.
This advice was pure gold and I cherish it to this day.
PAYCHEX is the epitome of the entrepreneurial success story with a market cap of $50 billion plus. Golisano is a self made multi billionaire and his book “Built Not Born” (https://lnkd.in/eZd-SnVh) is a great read that chronicles his and the Company’s history. I highly recommend it for all aspiring entrepreneurs.
From that night on, I looked in that mirror and asked myself those questions many times. It took me a few years before I answered a resounding YES to all those questions.
I then took that “Leap of Faith” every entrepreneur eventually takes.
After I made that “Leap of Faith,” our Company went on to achieve #10 and #13 on the Inc. Magazine 500 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies list in America in the early 2000s. We sold the business for “low nine figures” a decade later.
Currently, I am back at it with our company VERVE and I have never been more excited about a business in my life!
So you want to be a successful entrepreneur?
Look in the mirror and ask yourself those questions…
When you say Yes to them, let’s GO!
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