From 100s of rejection letters to an award-winning wealth-creation formula
I did not initially set out to be an entrepreneur. I graduated from college in the middle of a major economic recession with a mediocre grade point average, having avoided taking a single business class. It was then that something fortunate happened to me that would guide my future choices:
My applications for employment were declined by more than 300 companies. (Quite the accomplishment in 1979 when each letter had to be hand-typed and sent by regular mail.) Fortunately, the rejections gave me time to think and commit to a new course of action. I decided to convince a commercial bank to hire me. The idea was to maintain my career options while finding a job that would give me valuable knowledge about business and finance.
So in 1980, with nothing but a college degree in history and French, $500, and a box of hundreds of rejection letters from prospective employers, I loaded up my 1970 Volkswagen in New York and drove to Atlanta, Georgia. A few months later, I was hired by a regional bank, where, for the next six years, I was engaged in analyzing businesses and evaluating their ability to repay loans, while I simultaneously attended night school and eventually earned my MBA. Thus sparked a lifelong interest in business models and expertise in business model evaluation.
In 1999, as I sat in my office about to create a generic company model in Excel (of which I had created 100s by then), I reflected on how many variables there can be – often, the models I made were long and complex. I asked myself, “How few variables can you reduce a corporate financial model to?”
When I’d tinkered the variables down to six, I was so excited I wrote an article and shared the approach with several people. Then the article was published in Strategic Finance Magazine by the Institute of Management Accountants and was eventually awarded the best piece of 1999. That inspired me to write and share more about the formula over the years.
So it goes how a brief banking career led me to finance and eventually to the opportunity to take three companies public on the New York Stock Exchange, two of which I co-founded. (No doubt, The Value Equation also deserves credit for why I was able to get Warren Buffet to invest with us, ultimately becoming our single largest shareholder.)
And all the while, I have remained a student and observer of business.