The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [82]
His wife, Lise, read the book at the same time he did, and they started instituting some very basic principles outlined in that book: saving 10 percent of all they earned, investing it for the future. That was the beginning of the transformation toward financial responsibility in their lives. They’d save up, buy a little rental property. Then they’d save the income from that, buy another one, exercise strict financial discipline, until they built up to buy bigger properties. He now owns office buildings, retail centers, and a huge hockey arena in his community, employing about thirty-five full- and part-time people. He currently owns and manages a quarter-million square feet of commercial real estate.
Eventually, with his newfound wealth, David decided to come full circle. He spent $1.2 million to buy a twenty-four-room boardinghouse in the middle of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, renovate it, and convert it into the Vivian, named in honor of his mother.
The Vivian is what’s known as a “minimum barrier” environment. The women who live there have typically failed out of other rooming houses and shelters. They become locked in a cycle of jails, psychiatric wards, and the streets. The aim of the Vivian is to get them out of this cycle. (See http://www.thedagroup.ca for a moving video about the project.)
David says in the video, “Eventually my mother’s mental illness overwhelmed her, and she digressed to a life on the streets—a life very much like the life that these women here lead. In 1999 she died, alone, on the streets, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These experiences tore us apart as a family. We loved her dearly, we wanted to help her, but we couldn’t help her. Now that I have the capacity to help women like her, of course I’m deeply committed to doing that.”
David is making a massive positive impact on these women’s lives—in many cases saving their lives—and he would not have been able to do it had he not learned the art of sales at a young age.
With sales, you can achieve just about anything you want in life. The tougher the challenge you face, the bigger the change you want to make, the better sales skills you’ll need to develop!
What impact are you going to make with your newfound sales skills?
■ MARIJO’S STORY
A young single mother of three invested almost one fifth of her entire remaining savings in an urgent bid to provide a better future for her children.
The investment was $0.25, out of $1.35 remaining in her checking account.
It was 1965, and Marijo had been asked to leave her Catholic high school just after she turned seventeen, her senior year, when a bump started to show on her belly. She married the father that year, and went on to be a stay-at-home mom of three for eight years.
When she turned twenty-five, Marijo and her husband divorced, but her ex did not keep current on his child support payments, paying a sporadic $50 here and $20 there. As a previous full-time homemaker, without a high school diploma, she had never held a paying job before. Her parents were shocked and embarrassed by her behavior. (“First, Catholic girls don’t get pregnant at sixteen. And second, if they do, they don’t get divorced,” Marijo explained.) Her two sisters, high school students, spent most of their free time helping with the kids.
She was surviving. Still, her life savings were about to hit zero, and she decided to do something about it, fast, so she could support her children.
Marijo told me what happened next, as we sipped tea in the comfort of her well-appointed living room. The conversation was enhanced by the soundtrack of the mast of her own sailboat clanging lazily in the breeze, just beneath her living room window, opening directly over the exclusive marina in the San Francisco Bay, which houses her sailboat.
I took a quarter out of the remaining money in my checking account, got on the L in Chicago, and went downtown. You could get a transfer and come back for twenty-five cents. That was just within