The Billion Dollar Secret

by Rafael Badziag

  CHAPTER 2

  If You Want to Fly, First Leave the Nest

  It is not that we have a short life to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

  —Seneca

  In the previous chapter, you could see that the difference in results of an average entrepreneur and the outrageous success of self-made billionaires is not based on any outside factors. What, then, makes the difference?

  In any given industry, all players have more or less the same business model. They use the same methods and tricks, so why are most defeated while some achieve so much more than everybody else?

  Asked about that, Mohed Altrad, the refugee Bedouin turned World Entrepreneur of the Year, gave me this analogy:

  It’s a difference in the dimension of the person. It is as if I ask you what’s the difference between a Porsche, high-class car, and a Ford. With a Ford maybe you could drive at a certain speed, and then you could go up to another speed. But if you go, for instance, to 200km/h, then the car is not stable. It’s not going correctly. Whereas a Porsche doesn’t have this limitation. Why is a Porsche like this? Because people designed it in such a way to have no limit.

  For a car, the limit is given by its construction; for you as an entrepreneur, it’s given by your inner setup: your mindset, your belief system, your attitudes, your worldview, your motivations, your skills, your habits, your knowledge, and your personality.

  What about you? What is your limit that you can reliably operate on in business? Would you like to raise this limit dramatically in order to allow you to do really BIG things in business, things you never dared to dream about?

  This book is the instruction to do exactly this.

  Realize that the company you build is a reflection of who you are. It carries all your characteristics, including your limitations.

  “As you change, you will see your business style, your strategy of the company, everything changes.… If you want to create a $10 billion company, you have to solve a $100 billion problem. That means you got to help a billion people.”—said Naveen Jain, an American software billionaire and space entrepreneur.

  In order to be able to achieve extraordinary success in business, you need to have the mental setup of people who are extraordinary in business, the best entrepreneurs in the world. In other words, you need to think like a billionaire.

  This book will show you how self-made billionaires think and act, and they will teach you in their own words to do it as well.

  Do you want to be a Porsche or a Ford?

  This book is for those who want to be a Porsche in business, who are tired of mediocrity and want more out of their lives.

  Stand on Your Own Two Feet

  In order to achieve anything in life, you first need to become an independent human being.

  All the billionaires I interviewed had to stand on their own two feet early.

  Some, like Tim Draper, the legendary Silicon Valley investor, or Hüsnü Özyegin, the wealthiest self-made man in Turkey, left home for school at age 14 or even 10, respectively. But many self-made billionaires were born poor. This forced them to grow up earlier.

  You may change your view on child work if you read the account of Ron Sim, the Singaporean billionaire who built the OSIM empire:

  I always say I was lucky to be born poor, because it fuels the hunger. It fuels the despair, and it fuels the desire to make things right and good.

  We all lived together, seven kids, parents, grandparents on mom’s side, one uncle, one auntie. So 13 people living in the one-room flat. We all slept on the floor.

  I started working at the age of nine.

  Because at our home we didn’t have enough to eat, I got a job in the afternoon in a store selling noodles. The owner told me, “Okay, you can take these two bamboo boxes and go and knock on the houses and get orders.”

  Ron was getting three to eight cents commission a bowl depending on the size.

  So in the afternoon, between the school and 6:00 p.m., I could make up to 80 cents a day at the age of nine. It’s a lot of money. Compared to today, it would be easily … five to ten dollars. Those days, our pocket money was only five cents.

  Starting with Primary 4, I was always working. I survived on my own pocket money.

  The earlier you start to work, the better. You learn the value of hard work and money and develop ideas on where wealth comes from.

  In his childhood, Sergey Galitskiy, the internationally most respected Russian billionaire, spent a lot of time during the weekends doing physical work in his parents’ garden, being forced to it by his father. “Of course, being a boy I didn’t like it, but I am sure that hardworking spirit is what I received from him. I am sure that there are some things that you gain, and to be hardworking is something that I learned to become.”

  All the self-made billionaires I have interviewed started to work before the age of 18.

  Some worked during school vacations, like the Canadian billionaire and Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, saving up for his university. At 14 he was tearing down barn farmhouses for five dollars a day, then trimming trees for the Parks Department or parking and washing cars.

  Also Jack Cowin, the Australian billionaire and founder of Hungry Jack’s, worked during vacations from the age of 12, in summer cutting lawns, in winter shoveling snow. He also bought a paper route. “Every day you have to deliver papers, you have to collect the money from the customers every week. So you had that responsibility; you knew how much revenue you were going to bring in. I’m like 12 years old at this stage of the game. I remember on the paper route, I had a wealthy section. I remember seeing the doctors and the lawyers always had the nicest cars and the nicest house and things like this. So I think the penny starts to drop in your head that affluence has something to do with education and something to do with the ability to save money, get into your own business, and things like this.” With the money he saved up, he was able to buy a car when he was 16. “It’s probably the independence thing. Being able to have enough money that you don’t have to go to your parents.”

  But many now billionaires were working even before the age of 10:

  Tim Draper got jobs around the house from his mother. “We just went out and we were paid a penny for every minute we worked. I did weeding in the garden, I shoveled dirt, I painted a trailer, I cut down a tree, I mowed the lawn. Did a lot of work just around the house for my penny a minute.” That’s how he was able to get some money and to start his career as an investor. “My dad got me investing when I was nine years old. When I was nine years old, I was able to buy one share of a stock.”

  Tony Tan Caktiong, the founder of Jollibee, started at age eight selling newspapers.

  But the earliest starters were Hungarian-born, now Canadian billionaire and Linamar founder Frank Hasenfratz, as well as the Brazilian industrialist Lirio Parisotto, who were taking responsibility at the age of six.

  Frank remembers: “We lived on a farm, and you had to feed the chickens when you were six years old, and it had to be done on time. You want to play? Yes, you can play, but at 6:00 p.m. you’ve got to feed the chickens again. All the way through, the older you got, the more responsibility—and not just responsibility, but also privileges—you got. Later on, you had to feed the pigs. Later on, you had to be 10 or 11 before you were allowed to feed the horses. No question, you had to work. That’s the way it was.”

  Take Responsibility for Yourself and Others around You

  Lirio Parisotto was born in the south of Brazil in a small farmer village populated by descendants of Italian immigrants. There was no electricity, no radio, no running water or paved road in the town. “It was basically subsistence. I didn’t realize what I want for the future life. But one thing I knew: I didn’t like to work in the fields. It was too hard, too hot, too many mosquitoes. We were poor. We had money for the basic things like food, clothing, but not more than that. We didn’t have money to have a car, a jeep, or anything. And there was also a lot of disease because of the sanitary
conditions. They didn’t take care of the water, the food. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We didn’t have electricity. For lighting we used a kerosene lamp. Can you imagine?” He started earning money at age six: “We needed to take corn and extract the straw from the cob. It was used for wrapping tobacco and making what we called ‘straw cigars.’ I took it out, wrapped 25 together. We did it in the night after the dinner, two hours a day. Once a month someone came to the house and bought this.” As the oldest child, Lirio had to take responsibility for his siblings: “I was the first of 11 children. I had to take care of the second, and third and fourth and the fifth because I was the oldest and we didn’t have anyone to help my mother. She did all the food preparation, made clothes for all, took care of the animals, milked the cows to do the cheese. If my siblings did something wrong, the responsibility was mine, so I would put them under kind of a drill to make sure nothing would happen. [Laughs]”

  Also Dilip Shanghvi, the world’s wealthiest man in the pharmaceutical industry, and Kim Beom-Su, the Korean tech mogul, were made responsible for their siblings at an early age and were treated as adults.

  Kim Beom-Su lived as a child in a one-room apartment with five siblings, grandma, and parents. As the oldest son, he was destined to take responsibility for the entire family, and following the Korean tradition, the family took special care of him in order to develop his ability and his sense of responsibility. His family wasn’t well-off and had to make sacrifices so he could attend a university. He was the only one in the family to do that, a privilege he was aware of that he was grateful for and knew he would have to pay back in the future. “Because of these experiences, I was naturally able to give more after my success.” But his parents’ business went broke, and the family became homeless. “From then on, I worked like mad on part-time jobs. I worked so hard that the amount I earned then was several times more than what I earned working full-time after college. It was during that time that I came to jump straight into the world, instead of focusing on school and study.”

  Many billionaires supported their families even as kids either by giving the money they earned to their parents or by working in family businesses.

  Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, billionaire, and the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2003, was one of the top four students in the State of Karnataka and in grade 11 was awarded a National Scholarship. “I gave the money to my mother because we were eight children and we were brought up with the philosophy that we had to share whatever we had. Therefore, the natural thing to do was to give the money to the mother, who ensured that everyone benefited from it.”

  Sergey Galitskiy was 14 when he started working at the vegetable warehouse at his mom’s job. “I was doing hard physical work. I was loading the Pepsi Cola trucks. We didn’t have much of a choice at the time. We gave the money to our parents, but if we still wanted to leave some part for ourselves then they didn’t mind, but we saw that the life is hard. Of course, it was not that we made the decision, but we felt that we had to give the money to our parents. And unfortunately after that, every year I was a hard lifter.”

  Some billionaires I have interviewed grew up with just one parent, some were even orphans. They needed to take full responsibility for themselves and others around them.

  Start Your Own Business as soon as You Can

  You can’t become a billionaire as an employee. If you want to be financially ultra-successful, you have to get into your own business.

  Jack Cowin, the fast-food mogul, had a reputation for making lots of money on the side as a small-business guy when he was graduating from university. He was looking for a good paid job. The head of the residence where he was staying advised him to go and see Bill Pollock, a seasoned entrepreneur in personnel help, temporary help, office overloads. Jack went and Bill gave him a piece of advice that changed Jack’s future. He said, “I’m prepared to offer you a job, but you should really get into your own business if you want to be successful.” Jack and Bill maintained a relationship. Bill became Jack’s mentor and a shareholder in his future business.

  Jack shares this advice about wealth building: “Don’t get a job. Build a business. Get out of the personal exertion business. There is no eighth day, there is no 25th hour of the day. It’s not dependent on how hard you can work. It’s getting into a business that you can capitalize. That’s where wealth creation comes from.”

  I asked Lirio Parisotto, the Brazilian billionaire who is also a doctor of medicine, how it was possible for a doctor to become so rich. His answer will surprise you: “If you want to become really rich being a doctor, first of all, stop working as a doctor.” Instead, structure a medical business and form a working team out of top professionals.

  So take full responsibility for your economic future. Take your fate in your hands. The sooner you start your business, the better. You will have a longer runway and more time for trial and error.

  Ron Sim considers himself lucky he got into business early.

  Peter Hargreaves, the founder of Hargreaves Lansdown, the largest financial services company in the United Kingdom, when asked what he would do differently if he could start again, answers: “Well, probably start sooner.”

  This is also the answer I got from Naveen Jain, who started his first company when he was in his late thirties. “I wish I had done it when I was early twenties; I would have 20 years more experience to be doing things. My first company may not have been as successful, but the point is you learn a lot more by doing it than by learning from someone else. So if I had done it for 20 years, maybe my first company wouldn’t have been successful, second wouldn’t have been successful, but a third company would have been. By that time I would be early thirties, not late thirties when I founded the first company.”

  Many billionaires founded their businesses because they couldn’t be employees anymore. They saved up to start their business.

  When Hüsnü Özyegin returned from the States to Turkey, he stumbled upon his old school friend Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, the owner of Yapi Kredi Bank. Karamehmet appointed the 29-year-old Hüsnü to the board of his bank and made him a president of the bank at the age of 32. “I managed Yapi Kredi for three-and-a-half years. It was a loss-making bank when I took over and within three-and-a-half years became profitable.” He asked Karamehmet for 1% of the bank. “I wanted to be a shareholder of the bank with this 1%. I wanted to feel like the owner.” But Karamehmet said, “I have three banks. If I give you 1%, the other guys will ask for it as well. I don’t have a system like this. I’ll give you a good bonus.” And it was that day when he refused to give Hüsnü the 1% that Hüsnü decided to found his own bank. “It’s interesting, I was upset when Mr. Karamehmet didn’t grant the 1%, but obviously in retrospect he did me a huge favor, and today I am grateful to him.”

  In order to found a bank, capital is necessary. Hüsnü earned good money as a bank president in the years prior to this move. “I sold my two houses, for one-and-a-half million dollars, and moved into a leased apartment with my wife and two children, and then I borrowed another $1.5 million from three businessmen. I was able to own 65% of the bank with a capital of $8 million to start with, because I sold 35% of the bank with 50% premium to the first shareholders.”

  Nineteen years later, he sold the bank to the National Bank of Greece for $5.5 billion. This was the highest company sale in the history of Turkey, and it made him a billionaire. It was also a great deal for the other shareholders. “From the original 21 shareholders that bought 1% of Finansbank, only one kept the shares for 19 years, until the National Bank of Greece bought the bank. I saw him at a wedding. With his black-tie suit, and I had my black tie, in front of everybody he tried to kiss my hand, because he just had received $50 million on the tender offer from the National Bank of Greece against $120,000 that his father had bought for him.”

  Tony Tan Caktiong failed the job interview he was invited to by Pepsi Cola, because when asked what he wanted to do, he answered he wanted to have his own bu
siness. He may have been influenced by his father, who started as an employee, as a chef at the temple, but then he went on to open his own Chinese restaurant. “So maybe there’s this model that I too wanted to have my own business.”

  Also Michał Sołowow, the wealthiest person in Poland, knew he didn’t want to be an employee. After his graduation, he was working in car workshops in Germany in order to earn some money. He managed to save up $10,000, and this was his starting capital.

  I asked Tim Draper about wealth building advice he would give to people around the world. His answer was just two words: Start now!

  Control Your Environment and Your Destiny

  It is important to face reality. Naveen Jain confessed to me: “It may come as crazy, I don’t watch movies. And it’s really the reasoning is so odd. Movies take you into a different world. And I love my world. I don’t want to leave the world I live in so I don’t want to go to a different world and live the fictional world and leave my beautiful world that I love every minute of it.”

  You need to be responsible in the sense of Chip Wilson—meaning, instead of complaining about something, do something about it. Take responsibility for your environment. Realize that your environment shapes you. How you grow up, how the people around you think, it all influences your end result. Don’t let it be accidental.

  As Jack Cowin says, “Most satisfied people I know have control over their own lives and affairs. We are probably all seeking the independence to do what we want to, when and where we want to do it. How many unhappy people are there? Ninety percent of the population are in jobs, activities, or relationships out of economic necessity? They stay in a job they hate because they’ve got a mortgage, got school payments, and they become prisoners. So how do you control it? How do you maintain your ability to control that?”

  He told me about a talk to an MBA class he gave, where he said, “You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you’re going to get a job offer of $150,000. You’re going to develop a lifestyle. You’re going to join the golf club; you’re going to have private school for your kids. You’re going to buy a big mortgage. You are going to become a prisoner of that lifestyle. When I made the decision I was going to go into business, I had everything to gain, not much to lose.”