The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [85]
A friend connected John Paul to a job in sales in the hair care products industry. He had developed sales skills during a brief period selling encyclopedias door-to-door (long before the age of Wikipedia!). “It’s one of the greatest experiences of a lifetime. It teaches you how to overcome rejection. No matter what you do, whether it’s a service, whether it’s a product, whether you work for someone else—you need to have some kind of experience where you learn to overcome rejection and don’t let it get you down. Basically, you knock on a hundred doors and they all turn you away. Well, door number one hundred and one, you are just as enthusiastic as you were on door number one. That was a great experience.”
John Paul and a friend named Paul Mitchell, a hairdresser, had an idea to start a hair products company. They thought they had a backer, but when the backer changed his mind, John Paul asked Paul what he could spare. Paul Mitchell came up with $350, and John Paul matched it. With $700, they started John Paul Mitchell Systems hair care products (http://www.paulmitchell.com).
The duo focused on two things: creating a great product and selling it well. “You don’t want to be in the order business. You want to be in the reorder business. Big difference. My goal was not to sell something to somebody. My goal was to sell something that was so good, they want to reorder it again. And that’s the idea that we came up with,” John Paul told me.
They spent their $700 on designing the bottles in the company’s now-iconic black-and-white—because it was cheaper to print than color. The rest of the materials were purchased on thirty-day terms, which gave them a very short window to make the company work. John Paul and Paul believed in their products and—using John Paul’s sales skills—hustled the hell out of them. “I went knocking on doors, beauty salon doors, door-to-door selling our product and Paul did the same thing off the stage when he did beauty shows. And we kind of worked together as grass roots on.... [F]inally when the bill was due . . . [w]e didn’t have enough to pay the bill, so it was, ‘The check’s in the mail.’ Five days later, we had just enough to pay the bill.”5 John Paul told me, “No one wanted to invest in us. But once we were under way, it did grow organically. It took us about two years to pay our bills on time and have two thousand dollars left in the bank for my partner and me. Initially, that’s how we knew we were successful at John Paul Mitchell Systems.” The company kept growing organically, and growing, and growing. It now does over a billion dollars in annual sales, its products are sold in over one hundred thousand salons in nearly a hundred different countries, and the company employs thousands of people.
John Paul Mitchell, now a billionaire, has since diversified into many different businesses, including Patrón, now the world’s top-selling brand of ultra-premium tequila (and one of my own favorite libations). He devotes a lot of his time to philanthropy. His favorite charities tend to focus on providing food and shelter to impoverished people in the United States and around the globe, including Africa and Thailand.
But, unlike most wealthy people who donate to help feed and house the poor, John Paul is one of the few who has himself been homeless, and on the brink of starvation, barely able to provide for his son at that time. Fortunately for him, his family, his customers, his thousands of employees, and all the people he helps around the world, John Paul learned in the school of hard knocks an important skill: how to pull himself up by his bootstraps. This is the topic of this chapter.
■ THE FINANCIAL LIFE OF A COLLEGE DROPOUT VERSUS AN IVY LEAGUE GRAD—MY WIFE VERSUS ME
Mating wisdom of times past—and still proffered by some with oldfashioned values today—holds that a woman should