The Profit Prophet

We all talk about the value of having experience in our lives to be either more successful or happy. Throughout the ages, smart people have stated this fact in pithy quotes, and I have listed the top twenty here.   “When a man with money meets a man with experience, the man with the experience gets the money, and the man with the money gets the experience.” --William S. Knudsen “In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.” --Harold Geneen “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” --Albert Einstein “Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.” --Oscar Wilde “Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.” --Rita Mae Brown “You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.” --Albert Camus “Everyone in your life gives you something. The bad ones give you experience, the worst ones a lesson; the good ones give you memories, the best on...

When most people think of start ups they think of a couple of young kids working in a garage or basement (or now Starbucks), eking out a living until they are purchased for billions of dollars, but this is more fiction than reality. As published in Time's March 14th, 2013 issue, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, an academic and tech entrepreneur, and the Kauffman Foundation, the average age of successful start-up founders of start-ups and other high-growth industries was 40. And high-growth start-ups are almost twice as likely to be launched by people over 55 as by people 20 to 30. How can that be?  Well firstly, most startups take founders with multiple skill sets and know-how. Yes, dreaming is important, but execution is paramount to success. As an example of this, I thought I would share a story about an old dog and if you can draw the conclusion about age. A wealthy old lady decides to go on a safari in Africa, taking her faithful aged poodle named Cuddles along ...

I will begin and end this article with two quotations. The first is from Edward Rogers: "You don't deserve to be called an entrepreneur unless you've mortgaged your house to the business." --Edward S. (Ted) Rogers  This one sentence pretty much says it all. Entrepreneurs are not necessary gamblers, but they are willing to put everything they own, or go all in, in order to make it happen. In the classical sense an entrepreneur is define as anyone who has possession of a new enterprise, endeavor, venture or idea, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks associated with the development, growth, and outcome. He or she is an organizer who combines land, labor, material resources, and/or capital to create and market new goods, products, or services. The term "entrepreneur" is loaned from the French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon, where the term was applied to the type of persona who was willing to take upon th...