The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [35]
One day, during his freshman year, Elliott saw a bunch of smoke coming out from under the door of the resident adviser’s room. Curious, he opened the door and found Anthony Adams silk-screening T-shirts. It turned out he was doing about $1,000 per month selling funny shirts. That paid for his college tuition, and the room was free for being an RA.
Elliott asked him, “How do you have your own business?”
Anthony said, “Well, I have an LLC, I have a bank account, and I just sell the T-shirts.”
Elliott was puzzled. “I don’t understand—don’t you have to work for somebody to do that? Who hires you?” Anthony explained to him what an entrepreneur was.
“Wait, you mean I could actually make money without having to work for another person?” Elliott asked Anthony. Anthony nodded.
“Well, what job will you do after college?” Elliott asked. That question was met with a stare that had “You dumbass” written all over it.
Elliott’s young mind was thoroughly blown by this new concept—that you didn’t need to work for a boss to earn money. He figured he could start a T-shirt company too. He spent the rest of the year trying, yet failed miserably. Sophomore year, he started a consulting business, trying to get all the stores in Madison to hire him to bring in college students to brainstorm marketing solutions for them. That one bombed too. (One particularly embarrassing fuckup: he intended to e-mail a prospect a pitch, but instead e-mailed him the Excel spreadsheet containing logs of all his sales calls for the same pitch, including detailed notes on his calls with that specific prospect.)
But, Elliott says, “You learn by doing, and failing. By the second business, I understood how to put together the business. My pitch was getting better and better. By the third one—the real estate newsletters—I had two years of pitching and trying to sell under my belt. Those two years were incredible—the learning curve. Now with the newsletters, I had a better product to sell, and I actually got the gist.”
Through Elliott’s sales leadership and his tireless hard work (and skipping all of his classes), he built the real estate newsletter into a seven-figure business. He decided—since he wasn’t going to class anyway—it was time to take a leave of absence from college and focus on growing the business.
At a certain point, Elliott desperately needed help—he was managing way too much on his own. He decided he needed to hire some more people in the company. But he had no idea how to proceed. How do you hire someone? What do you look for? Where do you look?
He figured there must be some other young entrepreneurs in the country who had faced these questions, so he began doing some research. He found that, indeed, there were others out there. He came across lists like BusinessWeek’s top 25 entrepreneurs under 25, and the “Top 30 Under 30” from Inc. “These kids became my new idols,” Elliott told me.
Using the sales skills he had developed in launching three businesses (two of them failed and one was now successful), he began cold-calling young CEOs off the lists. If the key to great sales is to have a great product to sell, then Elliott had dreamed up perhaps the greatest pitch in all history: “Come on an all-expenses-paid ski trip to Utah with me and a bunch of other top young CEOs, I’ll fly you out there first class, we’ll all meet each other, and we can share information and knowledge.” As Elliott says, “It’s not that hard to convince someone to go on an all-expenses-paid ski trip.” Beyond the skiing, most of the young CEOs had never met each other and were thrilled with the chance to meet other top young leaders.
Twenty CEOs joined together on that first trip, which