The Butler Project

For the last two and a half years Dan has built up his multi-million dollar company. Many times during our conversation, the subject of entrepreneurship came up. Dan is passionate and, obviously, very knowledgeable about building your own business. Three times he gave me the same advice:

Mentors and Money

Dan: Be careful with entrepreneurship. . . Number 1, find a mentor, someone who’s done it before that can teach it you. Once you really know the business [and] how to do it, the second thing is [to] make sure you have money.

The industry that I’m in right now, I did it during college; I knew it really well. I had the capital to do it . . . [but] my business took a lot more money than I originally thought it was going to take. I was lucky that I had it sitting in a bank account, and I was able to go to people and say, “Hey can I pay you a little bit later? We sold a lot more than I thought we were going to, so I had to make a much larger investment. I’m a little bit short on cash, but can I wait until this next month and pay you you know, 9% interest or something crazy to make it worth your while to do it?” And all the guys that I did that to were accommodating.

Entrepreneurship wise, that’s what I tell guys if they’re looking into it. 80% of businesses fail in two years. 94% fail in 5. It’s tough to be able to survive; you’ve really got to know what you’re getting into. . . . if you’ve got the experience, and you’ve got the money . . . you can go for it. Get into it. . . start slow.

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People

Dan also talked a lot about people and their importance in the entrepreneurial equation

Dan: My professors used to tell me, “You bet on people, you don’t necessarily bet on a business.” If you’ve got the right guys in place, they’re going to make [the business] work no matter what happens. Come hell or high water, they’re going to find a way to make it profitable and make it successful. . . . It’s almost like you’ve got to find the right person that has that determination.

Recruit the right people with the same mentality. [If you're] working upstream with people that don’t want to follow you, get rid of them! Get the right people on the bus to start out with and grow.

[It's] like the old phrase goes, you know, “show me who your friends are and I’ll tell you where you’re going to be in 5 years.”

But it’s not just people Dan turns to for help. When I asked him about the #1 book he would recommend to people trying to be more successful, he said Dale Carnegie’s book, How To Win Friends and Influence People. He went on to tell me how books can help everyday.

Dan: [Read] self help books– it could be anything, it could be Tony Robbins, it could be sales books, it could be Zig Ziggler, Tom Hopkins, whatever . . . Just get in the habit of reading, even if it’s only for 20 minutes a day or a half hour a day where you wake up and you start your day with that and it just gives you ideas; it gets you in the right mind set. [Basically] you need a personal mentor, and I use a lot of those books kind of as that to get me upbeat and get me going.

Finally I’ll leave you with one of my favorite things Dan told me:

Business is so much fun. There’s so many different games, but most businesses are fairly similar. [And] once you get that safety and security, you realize too it’s not the money. The money is not the thing that you like, it’s the chase. It’s the chase of the money. It’s building something and providing jobs and changing peoples’ lives, that’s the fun thing.

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