The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [21]
When he got back from the Peace Corps, he kept on tinkering. “I was curious about a million different things that I wanted to explore.” He got passionate about the budding solar energy industry. He apprenticed himself for six months to a top plumber—in those days solar energy involved water as a heating element—and started a solar installation and plumbing company, hiring licensed plumbers beneath him. At this time, he also began teaching sailing part-time at sailing schools.
It was at one of these schools that he got a piece of advice that changed his life forever. “I had a very well-heeled and important client. He said, ‘Anthony, without a doubt, you’re one of the best sailing instructors I’ve ever had. But, there is no future for you in being a sailing instructor. You need to capture what you do, identify it, and codify it, so it can be taught to many, many people. First teach it to a team, and then beyond.’”
A lightning bolt hit Anthony through that one piece of advice (read Success Skill #2 on finding the right advisers in life). He became possessed with the vision of starting his own sailing school. At that time, sailing was only for superrich elites. There weren’t accessible sailing schools then, like there are today (with Anthony’s school being a prime example of one—he started the trend). He wanted to take his passion and love for sailing and make it accessible for as many people as possible.
“I was living in my plumbing van at the time. With a fever, staying up late every night in my van, I wrote out a business plan. Every aspect: how the boats should be cared for, how people should be trained, how visitors should be greeted, what the progression of studies will be.
“I started the school by borrowing boats on the Berkeley Marina. How do you borrow a boat? Well, have you ever seen an empty marina? [Laughing.] They’re filled with boats that are owned by people who don’t know how to sail them, and who will sell them to somebody else every three years. I walked the Berkeley Marina, saying to people, ‘Look, I’ll take care of your boat, and I’ll teach you how to sail, if you let me use it for my school during the week.’ I had my pick of the boats! Honestly, I think a kid could still do that today, it hasn’t changed a bit. [Laughing.] As I was doing that, I would get one client, then three, then five. I bootstrapped it entirely. No investment, no debt. A six-dollar business license.”
The school grew and grew from there. It now occupies a spectacular six-acre campus facing the Golden Gate Bridge. In his thirtyplus years in business, Anthony’s school has taught over twenty-five thousand people to sail, and now employs over eighty staff members, managing a fleet of over fifty boats and yachts. He lives in a gorgeous apartment directly overlooking the bay, part of the school complex. In the course of his work, he has led flotillas of sailing students and adventurers throughout Antarctica, Patagonia, Turkey, Greece, the Galápagos, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Tahiti, Australia, and the South Pacific, and regularly finds time for his own wild sailing adventures as well.
Although he’s lived an incredibly rich life so far, and plans to keep the school going strong, Anthony is now in the process of figuring out what the second stage of his life is all about. He knows it has something to do with teaching entrepreneurialism to kids. To that end, he’s been mentoring underprivileged children in the Bay Area on how to start businesses. “I don’t want to teach them general classes. I want to find the ten kids who want to learn how to be an entrepreneur. I can teach them to start a business out of nothing. Give me two twigs, and we’ll start a business out of it.”
Anthony wants to teach kids entrepreneurialism