wealth by chance

My personal travel schedule has been stretched to the limit, averaging three countries and five events each week. The stories I hear and the connections I see within this environment continue to flourish, and this is what energizes me each day. Creating and nurturing these ‘conditions for success’ is the subject of the following story…

WEALTH BY CHANCE

Last month I met an enthusiastic graduate of one of the many Entrepreneurship MBA programs currently on offer. As if by way of introduction, he asked “What is his exit strategy?”

“What?”

“What is your exit strategy? What is your plan?”

I asked him if he could name any famous billionaires who had made all of their wealth by setting up a plan with an exit strategy, executing the plan, and then getting out. couldn’t Now, I’m not saying that exit strategies aren’t useful. The first thing they tell you when you get on a plane is where the exits are. But exit strategies are for passengers, not pilots. The last thing you want to hear when you get on a plane is that the pilot will jump at 30,000 feet. The last thing you want to hear if you’re investing in Microsoft is that Bill will be bailed out once the share price hits $40.

It’s no coincidence that all of the world’s richest entrepreneurs continue to work long after they need to. They don’t see it as work, so there’s nothing to retire from. If retiring means quitting work to do what he enjoys, Warren Buffet retired the moment he started investing. The pilots do not leave. They are too busy having fun flying.

What about the plan? Did Richard Branson have a plan to get into airlines when he started Virgin Music? Did Steve Jobs have a plan to revolutionize the music industry when he created Apple? To the surprise of the graduate, we find time and time again that the great entrepreneurs made their millions by luck.

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I intended to be.” -Douglas Adams

“What? Wealth is just an accident?” Wealth is no accident if being lucky is part of the plan. Or in the words of Shirley Temple: “Luck needs no explanation.” Great entrepreneurs don’t start with a plan. They start with a passion. From there, the experiment begins.

Sam Walton started retailing at age 21 because his family’s neighbor was a retailer with 60 variety stores. Hugh Mattingly became one of Walton’s early mentors, showing him the trade and offering him a job. So Walton had a plan? “I don’t know about that sort of thing. But I’m sure of this: I loved retail from the beginning, and I love it today.” So, was the formula for the success of a Walmart in each city a fluke? No, it was out of necessity. As Walton prepared to open his first store, his wife Helen said, “I’ll go with you anywhere you want, as long as you don’t ask me to live in a big city. Ten thousand people is enough for me.” “

“Everything that exists in the universe is the result of chance and necessity.” – Democritus (460 BC)

A friend of Walton’s, Tom Bates, worked for a retail franchise, Butler Brothers. So Walton asked Tom what he would have that would suit a small town, and at the age of 27, he started a Butler Brothers franchise in Newport, Arkansas. He just happened to be right across the street from a very successful competitor, John Dunham. “It was a real blessing for me to be so green and ignorant, because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson that has stuck with me over the years: You can learn from everyone. I didn’t learn just by reading every retail publication I could. get my hands on, I probably learned more from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.

Then came the bad luck of the billion dollars. Not because it cost a billion, but it led to a billion. “In all my excitement about becoming Sam Walton, Merchant, I hadn’t included a clause in my lease that gave me the option to renew after the first five years.” Seeing the success of the store, the owner did not renew the lease and forced Walton to sell the store to the owner’s son. With no other viable location in Newport, Walton loaded his family and his belongings into a truck and began driving. They didn’t stop until they reached a small town, Bentonville, population 3,000. There, at the age of 32, he opened Walton’s Five and Dime Store. 12 years later in Bentonville he opened the first Wal-Mart, and today Bentonville is the headquarters of Wal-Mart’s $220 billion global empire. When Sam Walton died, he was the richest man in the world. His wealth was by chance, but not by accident.

“I run down the road long before I dance under the lights.” -Muhammad Ali

Three years ago, Steve Jobs was busy developing the iMac into a multimedia editing device. Jeff Robbin, a 28-year-old developer who had left Apple months before Jobs’ return, had started a company to develop Soundjam, a jukebox program. Jobs bought the company because Robbin had impressed the Apple team, and over the next year Jobs asked him to develop a jukebox for the Mac, which he did, and called it iTunes.

Jobs thought, if photo files can be portable on his camera, why can’t music files be too? He then asked Robbin if he could create a portable player, and nine months later the iPod was released. But it was only after the team was playing around with prototype iPods that they came up with the idea for Apple’s iTunes online music store. Less than 18 months after the iPod launched, the online store opened in April 2003. They expected to sell a million songs in the first six months, and ended up selling that many in the first six days.

The online music store was the pivotal bridge that opened up the entire market for PC users in a way that software alone had never done for Apple. Apple now owns 62% of the online music market and Apple’s iPod business alone is forecast to reach $6.2 billion in 2006, almost as much as all of Apple when Jobs took over. Did Apple’s stock price triple last year as a result of a plan or as a result of sheer luck? Steve Jobs has now, on three separate occasions, made a billion dollars by being lucky. But none of the three happened by accident.

“Give luck a chance to happen.” – Tom Kite, American golfer

So will your business success be the result of a plan or the result of your passion? Will you focus on dating or will you focus on experimenting? Great entrepreneurs do not create success. They create the conditions for success to occur. Only by giving luck a chance to happen will wealth happen by chance.

What will you seek to improve in the next month? How will you measure your progress?

At one of our seminars last year, a deflated lady came up to me at the end of the event and said, “How can I be successful? I’ll never be as good as everyone else here.” I saw her again recently and asked how she was doing. She said that she hadn’t really made any progress: “Why bother? I’ll never be as good as everyone else.”

This month, commit to changing something. Meet a mentor. Read more. Complain less. Reduce your costs. Reduce your calories. Change something and then measure the change. Compared. Not against others, against yourself. Don’t make it hard work. Make easy. Make it fun.

“I’m not trying to dance better than anyone. I’m just trying to dance better than me.” – Mikhail Baryshnikov.