Make Money for Bob

"Are you a strong performer, yet you don't quite fit in the corporate structure or as a support person in the start-up world? Maybe your talent and skills are trying to tell you that you've got what it takes to be an entrepreneur.”

--Bob Gourley

The conference room was expansive and silent.

The officers of Fuji USA sat stoically on the far side of a 25-foot-long, highly polished conference table decked out with all the latest electronic gizmos. They could be in instant visual and audio contact with executives back home in Japan if they had to --with the touch of a button. The conference room was at Fuji's opulent U.S. corporate headquarters in Elmsford, New York, just outside New York City.

I noticed how carefully they had arranged the chairs as I entered the room. We were not only put at a strategically lower power location, but our chairs were a good four inches shorter than theirs.

No matter, by then I'd experienced nearly every possible tactic the other side might try to use to claim the advantage during a negotiation setting. So I didn't flinch.

Instead, as I took my seat and waited for the senior officer to make his appearance, I couldn't help but smile to myself thinking how a guy from tiny Mountain Grove, Missouri, was about to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal with an international corporate powerhouse.

Looking back now, I might have flinched if I had known what was really about to happen. What I didn't know was that in one swift stroke, I would be facing something much bigger than I had ever imagined. That day in the Fuji boardroom was about to produce a startling chain of events that would become one of the biggest deals of my entrepreneurial career.

What would I do next? The most obvious solution would be retirement.

I have since realized that you never retire as an entrepreneur, you just get on a glide path in a new direction. Part of that new path for me was rewinding my experiences of buying, growing and selling businesses to write this book. People have often asked me for advice on successfully mobilizing talent, knowledge and skills.

As an entrepreneur, I certainly was no overnight success. My story is filled with episodes of learning through trial-and-error, dogged persistence and plain hard work. In that sense, mine is an entrepreneurial coming-of-age story of an impatient young man who wanted more out of life and was fortunate to be able to pursue and realize his dream.

Later in this book I'll get back to the unexpected events that unfolded as a result of my visit to Fuji's U.S. headquarters. First, let me take you back to my inauspicious beginnings.

It's often said there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. I like to think I'm the man in the middle --I like to make things happen. To say that I'm passionate about entrepreneurship is an understatement. I'm drawn to it like an insect to bright lights. To me, the individual entrepreneur and free enterprise are what continues to set the United States apart from any other nation on this planet. And I not only think that we need this system, I believe we'll always need it.

I came from a very average (by today's standards, less than average) family background. I grew up in the small town of Mountain Grove, Missouri, as the younger son in a family of house painters. Yet, over the years I've owned and operated companies in a variety of industries: food brokerage and meat packing; national food and beer distribution; printing and publishing; banking; one-hour photo lab retail operations; a natural gas distributorship, plus a number of investment partnerships. The experience of creating and growing operations over a wide spectrum of industries has, I believe, given me a unique view of what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. It also has taught me the importance of thinking like an investor, most importantly, how to make plans and presentations that will engage the people who can close on a deal.

Many great service and product ventures simply die in the process of being taken to market. The outstanding ones eventually get there on the second or third time around. Most of the world doesn't understand the real effort required to get there. Too many people prefer to focus on the rare stories about making it big with little visible effort. For many it's more exciting to hear how someone stumbled upon an idea (like the hula hoop), how the market magically ran with them, and how the creators became fabulously rich. Although that can certainly happen in our great USA, it's a little like trying to catch a glimpse of the tooth fairy. Most entrepreneurs need more than the luck of being in the right place at the right time. What I can show you is how to do it the hard way, the complete way, the proven way. For those fatalists who say you can't go from rags to riches, it's not worth the effort -- you're talking to the wrong person.

If you're like me, you probably have noticed a persistent entrepreneurial itch inside yourself since you were very young. Early on I helped out with sanding, scraping, puttying, prime painting, and some finish painting with my father and uncles from the age of about fourteen. I was sure, however, that I did not want this to be my career. There is nothing wrong with this good honest work; I just had an itch for something else.