Knife Fighting for Entrepreneurs: Timeless Lessons from a Successful Businessman

This is my dad.

He’s pretty much taught me 94% of what I know about business.

We talk every day, mostly about business!

Big Daddy Bruce was an entrepreneur “before it was cool”.

Of his MBA class in the early 1980s - less than 10 became entrepreneurs.

Obviously, the world has shifted!

I’m spending a lot of my time these days "supporting” business owners via various projects (example 1, example 2) - and while outsourcing & global talent is a huge part of what I can help with - oftentimes more fundamental business truths need to be discussed.

So - I went to the man who taught me how to “live by my wits” (and who has done it very successfully for almost 40 years) to write a few timeless lessons based on his experience.

Not lessons from classrooms.

Not lessons from an engagement hacker on Twitter.

Lessons from the real-life “knife fighting” on being an entrepreneur - and doing it well!

I hope you’ll revisit these rules as often as I do.

So, here they are - and off to Bruce!

Knife Fighting for Entrepreneurs and Other Business Pirates

We have a lot in common. 

Perhaps the most important thing in business that you can have in common……the desire to succeed or fail on the basis of your own skill, effort, creativity, and smarts. 

We’ve all rejected the company womb.  

We are the true business pirates of 2022 (although I became a business pirate in 1984).

First, brief context. 

To this day, my happiest day in business.  I had just graduated from Harvard Business School, the “West Point of Capitalism”. 

My classmates were all going off to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and IBM. 

I interviewed a bit…most notably with Proctor and Gamble. 

Seven interviews for a single position in corporate strategy. 

In the end, I (professionally) blew the seventh guy off, saying that I could never work for a company that needed seven people to be involved in a hiring decision.

I started a magazine company based on a market niche I identified in business school. 

I had no money. 

My Father-in-law loaned me 20K. 

The printer took my accounts receivables as a deposit on the printing I needed to be done. 

Sweet talked a bank for another $20K.  

My windowless office was next to a dentist specializing in kids. 

They screamed all the time.

It was heaven.  

Writing the initial sales on the “board”…first one, then five, then enough to beat breakeven, then enough to make some money was an indescribable rush. 

A rush I hope each of you is or will experience. 

There is nothing like it. 

Have you felt it? 

Incredible.

We….you and me….are people of action and results. 

And there is no better way to scratch that itch than by starting or buying a business.  

Business Truths

There are certain business truths. 

Every one of them applies to establishing and successfully operating a small business and living by your wits - here are 8 of my favorites!

1.     Sharks Closest to the Boat.  You are in a small boat (your business….)  You are surrounded by sharks.  What do you do to free yourself of the sharks?  Attack the ones closest to your boat. 

So if you have five problems on Monday morning, which ones do you tackle first?  The ones that are the most pressing and the most time-sensitive.  Yes, duh, a shark three feet from your boat is more of a threat than one 50 feet away.  Same in managing a small business. 

A worker calls with a materials problem on a job, and your banker calls to discuss setting up a financing program.  The worker and their problem are ‘closer to the boat’. 

The banker can wait.

2.     Bite-size Problem Solving.  You will sometimes face big problems, and when you first see them, appear gigantic. 

What do you do? 

The answer is a joke, that I will undoubtedly mangle.

Question: “How does a mouse eat an elephant?”

Answer: “One bite at a time”

The lesson here is to break down large, intimidating problems into a series of smaller manageable problems. 

One bite at a time. 

Solve all the small problems, and the big problems will be on the way to being solved.

3.     “Hot Food Hot”.   I had a boss in my early years who came out of the restaurant industry.  I was a young manager, coming off a successful entrepreneurial run, seeing what it was like to run a big corporate group.

I did not like him or the job much, but he left me with a magnificent insight. 

He said running a restaurant (and a business) is really simple….. “You just have to serve “the hot food hot, and the cold food cold”.

So how does this apply to a small business? 

Execution matters.  A good product/service well priced is “hot food hot”.

4.     Don’t Do Stupid Shit.  One of my good friends is a carpenter.  He is a perfectionist.  He never really succeeded as a carpenter because in his journey to carpentering perfection he chewed up his profits. 

Funny story.  He was working in a loft. 

There was some work that could have been done that would not affect the integrity of the job and would never be seen by the customer. 

He spent a day making it perfect, “because that’s just how I do things”. 

OK, he had it his way and made no money on the job.  

5.     Opportunity Cost as Mantra.  As a small business owner, you’ll have a lot of chances to do lots of things. 

How do you decide what to do, beyond the simple concept of what makes the most money? 

Profit alone can be misleading. 

When Jon bought a company a few years ago, the owner would take jobs that involved custom work, often far away. 

On paper, they looked like home runs. 

But we could not do other smaller, more predictable jobs. 

We were chasing big projects in areas in unfamiliar areas, far away with tough-to-execute corrections. 

There were hidden costs that made the more complicated jobs bad business propositions.  Sometimes the more simple task - that you know - can be far more profitable that the big flashy project. 

Remember…it’s not about sales, it’s about profits.

6.     Prepare to be a Target.  Oh yeah, there are a lot of scumbags out there.  Many of them are going to look for ways to get some of what they think you got. 

Often, this comes through lawyers, exploiting something to get shakedown money. 

You defend yourself by making sure your organizational structure protects you personally, and your company as much as possible. 

Business insurance can be very comforting, although sometimes expensive.

I’ve had an ex-employee literally make up stuff. 

He found a lawyer who wrote a nasty three-page letter alleging $300,000 in damages, but “he would settle for $30,000”. 

Oh really? 

We went to our very good lawyer. 

We did most of the legwork to keep the cost down. 

Our response was nuclear - and it wasn’t a bluff. 

Now the dirtball lawyer was looking at a mess. 

He was on contingency and would end up making nothing. 

We never heard from the dirtball lawyer and his dirtball client again. 

Semper Paratus. Always be prepared.

7.     Ripe Peaches.  Our family has a farm in New Jersey where I was lucky enough to work during the summers. 

My uncle, a no-nonsense farmer, taught me something important. 

I could never understand why we had to pick peaches at sunrise and go all day, and then load fruit trucks until 2 am. 

His message to me was simple. 

“When the peaches are ripe you pick the damn peaches.  If we wait, they will rot and we will have nothing”. 

Being an entrepreneur means sometimes working strange hours, whenever necessary, and doing things outside your comfort zone.  There is nobody else to pick the peaches - or run your company.

8.     Stop digging.  My dad (Jon’s grandpa) and I were at an elegant restaurant in NYC.  I got a small fishbone in my throat.  As only he could say, he told me to “eat a soft pretzel to make it go away.”

Bad move. 

I ended up, at 3am in a Harlem emergency room, with a doc digging into my throat. 

He told me appeared as if something had ‘unnaturally’ pushed the bone four or five inches into the deep tissue of my throat, and that I would barely avoid surgery. 

Don’t make things worse. 

If something is a nagging problem or a losing proposition, you should bail. 

The cliché “throwing good money after bad” applies. 

Remember point 5 on opportunity cost. 

By the way, this applies to relationships, employees, business decisions…all of it.

Jon again.

I hope you enjoyed these lessons as much as I have - there is a whole second section that I’m sure I’ll share at some point as well.

We must study the lessons of history so that we don’t repeat them!

Happy Outsourcing.

Jon

P.S.: I’ve recently started doing some “one-on-one unlimited coaching” engagements, working with business owners on systems & global talent. It is insanely fun and insanely impactful. Book a time with me if you want to talk about it. My wife says I work too much (Guilty… I love it) so I’ve got 5 of 7 slots filled until I shut it down and do a waitlist!