- Joined
- Jul 29, 2011
- Messages
- 151
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- 19
I’ve been in business for over 32 years and over that time I’ve learned a whole lot of lessons that have enabled me to become the success I am today. I see so many people start businesses and fail because they don’t understand some of the very basic principles that will propel them to financial prosperity
I started my first business when I was just 16 years old. My friend and I founded a business called “Frontier Publications” and we developed a board game that ultimately sold in stores all over the country. The problem that we both had was that neither of us had a penny to our names. Always remember, never and I again say never let money get in the way of your dream.
My first business presentation was to my father where I’d used the spreadsheet program Lotus 123 to calculate out that we needed $4,000 dollars to fund a dip in our business’s cashflow. When I look back on it, a couple of things were pretty amazing. The first is that I spent the time learning Lotus 123 on an original IBM PC and second that I even knew what a cashflow was.
Learning Lotus was one of the most painful exciting things I’ve ever done. It was painful because back then I think that programmers took as much pleasure in making the programs as hard to use as they were to write. There were just so many esoteric commands to learn….but it was awesome!
I’ve told my own kids (they still don’t get it) that Lotus and Excel are the two best computer games ever invented. You can put a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet and presto you can predict the future. It’s like the ultimate crystal ball for business. If you don’t know Excel then whatever you do learn everything about it!
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