The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [95]
“I was making really good money. Come senior year, I’d have some weeks when I’d do a couple of thousand dollars. I had respectable savings, everything I wanted.” What did Marc do with that savings? Did he put it in the stock market or a CD account? In classic bootstrapper form, he put his earnings right back into his business and his earning power. “Marketing tools, taking slides and photos. Getting hats embroidered and giving them away to my clients. Going to local town fairs and setting up a booth. I was always reinvesting in my business.”
Even though Marc was making serious money for a high school kid in the eighties, and was learning more about running his own business than most people ever do, a counselor got the better of him. “My guidance counselors at school were like, ‘It’s really cute, these T-shirts, but you really think you’re going to feed the mouths of your babies doing this?’ At family events, people would be saying, ‘You could earn seventy-five, eighty K if you go to college, and if you get a law degree, you might be able to earn six figures!’”
Marc paid heed to this advice and decided to follow his father’s footsteps into the Rutgers College of Pharmacy. He kept his business going on the side, however. In 1992, Marc decided to create a customized airbrushed jacket for Michael Bivins, of the R&B group Bell Biv DeVoe, who was appearing at a local concert. Marc could barely move due to shoulder surgery, but his sister hopped onstage and hand-delivered the jacket directly to Bivins, with a handwritten note in the pocket. “I get a call at three in the morning, he wants more custom work. Soon I’m nineteen years old, getting backstage access to concerts, hanging out with all these hip-hop artists, doing art for them, and then I would go back to pharmacy school in the day. There was no passion there. I couldn’t get past the periodic table. It didn’t make sense to me. There was something in me that was beating about art, some energy that was dominating me.”
Failing at classes as he focused on his art and business, Marc had a meeting with the dean of the school, Dr. John Colaizzi. He saw Marc’s passion for art and his real-world success, and he was remarkably understanding. “He said to me, ‘You don’t ever want to be in the place where you coulda, shoulda, woulda. You’re young now. Go do it while you’re young, and you’ve got the parachute of youth. You can come back if it doesn’t work out for you.’ I left school and never looked back.”
A family friend introduced Marc to a man named Seth Gerszberg. The New York Times says, “Gerszberg radiates hustle. Spend five minutes with him, and you won’t be surprised to learn that he dropped out of college because he was making $5,000 a week selling salvaged architectural ornaments, of all things.”6 Gerszberg invested $5,000 cash for a 50 percent stake in the company, and remains Marc’s business partner to this day. Through many twists and turns (and a flirtation with bankruptcy), the duo pioneered the category of “urban wear,” turning Marc Ecko Enterprises (http://www.marceckoenterprises.com) into one of the most recognized brands in global fashion, with annual revenues of over $1 billion.
Marc did not graduate from college, but he now has a PhD. In 2009, he was invited back to Rutgers to receive an honorary doctorate, and delivered that year’s commencement speech, with Dean Colaizzi proudly looking on.
I interviewed Marc in his impressive offices on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. Education is one of the topics he’s most passionate about, and in an eloquent riff on the subject, he introduced me to a word I’d never heard before. I’ve been an avid reader of serious nonfiction since fifteen, so it’s not that often I get introduced to new words, but this one couldn’t be more relevant: “andragogy.” Its literal meaning, I found out, is “man-leading,” and is contrasted with “pedagogy,” which means “child-leading.” I Googled it, and in the Wikipedia entry for the concept I found a pitch-perfect description of the way all the self-educated millionaires I’d been interviewing