How to get rich, p.24
How to Get Rich, page 24
5. At senior level, insist on collective responsibility for bonuses. Part of the annual incentive bonus for senior managers should result from their combined efforts to bring home the bacon. One cannot make a senior manager’s whole bonus rest on this edifice. But peer pressure is a powerful force. If senior managers sense one of their number is slacking and fear they may all suffer for his or her transgressions, they are likely to let their feelings be known. Forcefully.
6. Praise excellent work. But do not waste your praise on ho-hum performances as a sop. Employees respect a boss who knows the difference between the mundane and the exceptional. Remember that not all employees respond well to incentive bonuses or a dangled carrot of any kind. They seek recognition, not bribery.
7. Fire malingerers, incompetents, toads and glory hounds mercilessly. Not only does firing them make you feel better and contribute to a more pleasant working atmosphere, it cheers up the whole staff.
8. Turn a cold eye on company “perks.” These can add up to huge sums. While I am considered terribly old-fashioned on this subject, I am still uneasy about company-issued credit cards; company-issued mobile telephones; travel and entertainment of any stripe at the company’s expense; company air travel in any class but economy.
9. Avoid all “jollies,” the generic British term for flying the sales team to Florida in winter to “boost morale” and issue tub-thumping speeches, all of which are forgotten the second the crew hit the beach. You can’t afford “jollies.” Ignore protestations from sales managers to the contrary. A day set aside in a quiet environment, prepared for carefully, to assist sales teams improve their presentations to clients, is sensible. As is sales training from reputable training agencies.
10. Offer legal perks that you have paid for yourself to employees. This sounds crazy, but it works. I allow my employees, for example, the use of my Rolls-Royces or Bentleys for their weddings. I permit them to stay at my homes around the world if they have performed well. I send every child born to an employee (well, I used to in the early days—there are too many of them now) a massive soft toy. Such perks are legal because I paid for them myself from after-tax dollars or pounds.
11. Set an example. If, as an owner, you want fancy furniture in your office or works of art or Persian rugs, then bloody well pay for them yourself. How can you expect frugality when a junior manager, who works in a cubicle, comes to visit you, knowing that the company paid for those accessories? There is nothing wrong with them being there. It’s who paid for them that counts.
12. Encourage senior managers to go over annual results with you one-on-one. You will learn more from off-the-cuff remarks and opinions expressed at one-on-one meetings while looking over financial results than you will in a dozen board meetings. This tactic never fails to produce food for thought, often on both sides.
13. Back up your managers. With delegation comes responsibility. Back up your managers, in public, whenever and wherever you have to. If they do not perform, speak seriously in private to them. If they still do not perform, fire them. But do not undercut them or engage in meetings that appear to undercut them. Reprimand other managers who bad-mouth their peers. Nearly everyone’s ego and self-confidence is more fragile than the outside world believes.
14. Search out and promote talent. Talent comes in all shapes and sizes and is often inarticulate and shy. Talent isn’t necessarily the woman in the Calvin Klein suit who talks the talk and bamboozles meetings with stunning graphics on her PowerPoint presentation. Talent is often to be found dressed in T-shirts down in the lower reaches of your organization. Set a bounty on talent among managers. When you find it, test it. Groom it. Work it until it’s ready to drop. Load it with more work and responsibilities. Praise it. Reward it. It will make you loads-a-money.
15. Interview your rivals’ talent. I have never known a single person in a rival organization, however well paid or cosseted, who has refused to meet me for a quiet drink after work. I have discovered more about what my rivals are up to in this manner than any other. In addition, I have often been so impressed with the people I met in this way that I poached them later. No intelligence-gathering exercise is ever entirely wasted in business. There is only so much pie. Talent bakes that pie.
16. Discourage secrecy. The more you take middle and senior managers into your confidence, the more they will respect you and the harder they will work for you. Many managers disagree with this policy. They love the feeling of power that comes from knowing what others do not know. I don’t care about power. I care about getting rich.
17. Save a little bit of pie for suppliers. Save a little of the annual pie to wine and dine key suppliers. Or let them wine and dine you. If you like them enough, invite them to your home. We all remember to call often upon our major customers. But it is worth remembering suppliers. And they often have important market information.
18. Never bad-mouth rivals. It’s a sign of stupidity and weakness. I try to go out of my way to praise my rivals when I can. Often enough they deserve praise and they’re sure to learn about my comments sooner or later. Why go out of your way to antagonize them? (Secretly feeling sorry for them, because they do not own as much of their own company as you do, is definitely permitted.)
19. Sell early. Real money rarely comes from horsing around running an asset-laden business if you are an entrepreneur . You are not a manager, remember? You are trying to get rich. Whenever the chance comes to sell an asset at the top of its value, do so. Things do not keep increasing in value for ever. Get out while the going is good and move on to the next venture. More money is usually lost holding on to an asset than is made waiting for the zenith of its value. I should know—it’s my own biggest defect.
20. Enjoy the business of making money. The loot is only a marker. Time cannot be recaptured. There is no amount of pie in the world worth being miserable for, day after day. If you find you dislike what you are doing, then sell up and change your life. Self-imposed misery is a kind of madness. The cure is to get out.
21. Never miss an opportunity to promote your asset. Try purchasing one (or both) of my books of poetry: A Glass Half Full or Lone Wolf for instance. If they are not in your local bookstore, then go to www.felixdennis.com and check them out. Each contains a spoken-word CD and may well transform your entire life. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist that.)
15
The Power of Focus
The vulgar thus through imitation err;
As oft the learned, by being singular;
So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng
By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.
—ALEXANDER POPE, "AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM”
Focus on Keeping Your Eye on the Ball
It was Alexander Pope who wrote the immortal lines concerning learning, and how a little of it “is a dangerous thing.” Much the same could be said about certain people’s behavior following even the most modest success. It blinds them.
What is it you are attempting to achieve here? You are trying to become rich. This must be the main focus of your business life. Becoming rich. Not becoming one of the world’s most famous athletes, or taking on Rupert Murdoch in the newspaper publishing and television business, or having your name appear a thousand times when you type it into a Google search.
You want to get rich. And you want to do it legally and as quickly as you can.
That is what we are supposed to be about. Unfortunately, as John Lennon pointed out, our lives are “what happen while we’re busy making other plans.” And that is precisely what happened to me and a great many other people I know. We forgot we were supposed to concentrate on getting rich and concentrated, instead, upon excelling in the first sphere we succeeded in.
Why am I a magazine publisher? Is it because I love magazines? No. It’s because I had a tiny success back in 1967 selling a hippie magazine on London’s fashionable King’s Road. That’s right. I discovered that at two shillings and sixpence a time (half for me, half for the owner, Richard Neville), I could earn more money than I could as an R&B drummer or a high-street-store window dresser.
I even learned that by dressing up one or two girlfriends in the shortest skirts they owned and instructing them to approach every guy under thirty with a big smile and the following words: “Hi! Have you got your copy of OZ this month yet?” I could triple my earnings. (Some wits might say that having created the world’s biggest men’s lifestyle magazine, Maxim, I’m still at the same old game. Well, let ’em say it.)
It was nothing unusual for me to return to Richard Neville’s basement flat in the King’s Road days to divvy up the loot and discover a hundred pounds in my satchel. A hundred pounds! In those days, nobody I knew had ever earned a hundred pounds in a fortnight. I could earn it in a day or so.
And so I became a magazine publisher. That was OK, but I forgot to keep my eye on the ball. The ball was to get rich. Instead, I decided to become one of the world’s best magazine publishers. Not smart.
Why wasn’t it smart? It took me way too long, for one thing, and it cut me off from more lucrative endeavors for another. I became a multimillionaire in 1982. By then I was thirty-five years old. Barmy! By thirty-five I was already half dead.
With my talents I could have been a multimillionaire by the time I was twenty-five or twenty-eight. All that was stopping me was my conviction that I was a born magazine publisher. How stupid. I wasted eight or nine years when I could have been drinking Petrus, swilling down Retsina and lager instead.
The truth is I led myself to believe I had fallen in love with publishing. That wasn’t a tragedy in itself, but I allowed my liking for the magazine publishing business to blinker me from so many other avenues where I could have coined cash.
If you have entrepreneurial flair, then you can go into just about any business and make money. But instead of rushing to where the money was, I kept on digging in the relatively poor pit of ink-on-paper until the money, reluctantly, came to me.
This is so important, gentle reader. It pains me to think about it. If you wish to become rich, look carefully about you at the prevailing industries where wealth appears to be gravitating. Then go to where the money is! That is where you should focus your efforts. On the ball marked “The Money is Here.”
Let us say I had done something worthwhile with my life, which I have good reason to doubt, and had raised a son or daughter. Would I allow either of them to go into the magazine business today? You must be joking.
What is the magazine business? It is a business where our main activity is chopping down millions and millions of trees, flattening the pulp and printing hieroglyphics and images on both sides of it. Then we send the end product out in diesel-guzzling trucks to shops where perhaps 60 per cent of them sell to customers. We then pile the remaining, unsold magazines into more diesel-guzzling trucks and take them to a plant where they are either consumed as fuel, buried or shredded, or used to make cardboard boxes for refrigerators. That’s the magazine business.
Does this sound to you like a great business? Of course it isn’t. Do you imagine I would allow any grown child of mine to go into such a business? Of course I wouldn’t. The magazine business will have faded to a shadow of its former glory within a decade or three. It is a mature business, and few fortunes are made in mature industries, unless you are lucky enough to create a monopoly in one. I was luckier than I knew.
So what businesses should I have gravitated toward? Computer software, technology and dot com start-ups, cable and satellite television, property, environmental waste clean-up, alternative energy services...any one of these might have created a much larger fortune for me in less time than I took with magazines. Do I know anything about these industries? No. But, then, I didn’t know anything about magazines in 1967 either.
So this is the first lesson in the power of focus. Keep your eye on the ball if you wish to get rich. And do not forget which ball.
It’s the one marked “The Money is Here.”
Timing
There is no substitute for good timing. There is always luck involved, but it’s often the kind of luck you help make yourself.
With my friend Don Atyeo, I wrote two biographies many years ago. The first one was about the martial artist and film star, Bruce Lee. We received a pitiful advance from a very small firm in London called Wildwood House run by a publisher of the old school, Oliver Caldecott. Oliver was a kindly soul, and he thought he might just be able to sell a few thousand copies of what would be the first biography written about Bruce Lee. Lee was a cult figure in Hong Kong and the UK at the time.
Don Atyeo and I were broke. We knew nothing whatever about kung-fu and nothing about Bruce Lee. Neither of us was a film buff. Neither of us had ever written a book before. Our only qualifications for this task were as follows: 1) It was our idea. 2) We owned a typewriter each. 3) We had visited Asia. 4) We were broke.
Our contract with Wildwood House gave Oliver rights to publish our biography in Hong Kong, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. No other territories were mentioned in his contract because it was inconceivable that the book would ever be published or wanted in them.
Don and I buried ourselves in research. We visited Hong Kong (on a shoestring budget) and got a lot of interview material (including, incredibly, an interview with Bruce Lee himself), and then we sat down in my Soho flat in London and began typing. Typing, rather than writing, would be the operative description.
This was hack work of the most demeaning kind. But it was fun and we needed the money. Then good timing arrived. Good timing for us, that is. Bruce Lee died suddenly and unexpectedly in Hong Kong in July 1973. Overnight, he became a global superstar. And we had almost finished his biography—the only biography then written about him.
The world erupted in Bruce Lee mania. His films began playing to packed audiences in scores of countries. For a brief moment, he was the most famous man on the planet. Most movies appeal only to moviegoers in one or two continents, but Bruce Lee became a star not only in Europe and North America, but in Africa, South America, India, Central America, the Middle East and Asia.
At my request, Don leaped on a flight to Hong Kong. A flight we could not afford. Oliver loaned us the money. There, Don got the lowdown from the hospital where Lee had died, interviewed surgeons and nurses there and went on to obtain interviews with Bruce Lee’s mistress and minders and pieced together what had happened on the night Lee died.
It was an explosive story, and all the more compelling because his death was considered suspicious by many of his fans. Meanwhile, Lee’s movie company Golden Harvest, run by Raymond Chow, together with Lee’s wife, Linda, were concocting a smokescreen designed to protect the film star’s reputation. This was understandable (he had collapsed in his mistress’s apartment) but rumors of criminal and even supernatural involvement in his death swirled around Hong Kong.
Eventually, these rumors reached the outside world. The result was an international media firestorm.
When famous people die, there are always rumors which coalesce into conspiracy theories. It’s just human nature. In Bruce Lee’s case, this speculation reached absurd levels and only served to heighten worldwide interest in his movies. In the Western world, Don Atyeo and Felix Dennis, two hard-up hippies living in a slum in central London, now became Bruce Lee “experts.”
Hey! Compared to the hundreds of other journalists assigned to the story from around the world, we were experts. No sooner had Don flown out of Hong Kong, interview tapes and photographs bulging in his luggage, than a well-oiled machine rolled into place. Golden Harvest’s machine. And Mr. Chow was one of the most powerful men in Hong Kong. The worldwide media circus arrived too late.
Journalists from newspapers in every capital city in the Western world could find no one to interview. Lee’s wife, his mistress, Betty Ting Pei, his producers, his housekeepers, his drivers, his studio colleagues, the hospital staff and anyone connected with Bruce Lee and his movie company clammed up. Our timing had been perfect. We had slipped in and out “under the radar.”
We finished the book in record time and Wildwood House published Bruce Lee: King of Kung-Fu in the UK to the delight of legions of ecstatic Bruce Lee fans. It went straight into the British nonfiction bestsellers list. For the first time, Wildwood House had a bestseller on their hands. And Don and I had money in our pocket.
But there was far more money to come from this splendid piece of good timing—unless you happened to be Bruce Lee. I realized I owned the rights to our biography in many countries around the world—all of Europe, Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, most of Asia and, most crucially of all, the USA. In addition, because my little company had designed the book, we had the negatives and typesetting on hand. Together with an old friend and lawyer, Andrew Fisher, as well as book agents Abner Stein and Nat Sobel, I got busy.
The result was a river of coin flowing into Don’s pockets, my pockets, Andrew’s pockets, the agents’ pockets and my company’s pockets from foreign edition after foreign edition of our book. There were translations into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Arabic, Spanish and a host of others. It also meant I got to meet up with a hero of mine again, Jann Wenner, who had founded Rolling Stone, the American music magazine.
Jann’s book publishing division, Straight Arrow, bought the US rights. The book there was redesigned by Jon Goodchild, the very man who had taught me to design magazines in the early days of OZ in London, who was now living in San Francisco. Bruce Lee: King of Kung-Fu flew off the shelves in North America. I’m told it was one of Straight Arrow’s bestselling books ever.
