Me, Inc. Read online

  When heads of state need hospital care, they go to big-city hospitals because they want the best care. Small towns, unfortunately, do not have the level of emergency medical care that is found in big-city hospitals.

  The best doctors and surgeons are also paid more in big cities, and are attracted to big cities because there are more potential patients and more up-to-date medical facilities.

  Sorry. That’s the truth.

  You may be asking—what is all this talk of health and safety doing in a book about successful entrepreneurship?

  It’s because these are all factors that need to be taken into account. Health and safety are about preserving life, and life is business. Health, crime, and everything about your life contributes to your chances of success. The more road bumps there are on your journey, the harder it is to get to where you want to go. Crime diminishes your chances of success. You might get injured, killed or robbed. Bad health services/poor hospital care diminishes your chances of success.

  So, for your health.

  Your safety.

  Your job opportunities.

  Move to a big city.

  THE ART OF MORE: PRINCIPLE #5

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  Technology has afforded us the ability to connect with people and do business from anywhere in the world, via cell phones, Skype, email, and the Internet. But there is no substitute for (actual) face time and (actually) pounding the pavement. Once you’ve built a successful business you can conduct meetings via satellite from a yacht if that’s your wish, although even the most successful moguls are constantly hands-on with their respective businesses.

  Until you reach that point I suggest you do everything you can to be as close to a city as feasible, and keep as low an overhead as possible.

  17

  Single or Married? Career or Family?

  “The only place Success comes before Work is in the dictionary.”

  VIDAL SASSOON

  hairstylist, cosmetics magnate, and philanthropist

  As I’ve advised elsewhere in this book, you should let nothing and no one stand in your way on the road to success.

  First become successful. Then worry about everything else.

  This is why I need to address the issues of marriage and family with you at length here. I touched on it earlier, but it bears emphasizing.

  Career or family? Often, you can’t have it both ways.

  Pick one. Choose wisely.

  If he or she is demanding more of your time, and if that stops you from pursuing the opportunities you desire, you may have a life decision to make. That may mean you saying, “Right now, my career is the most important thing in my life.”

  Ladies! Don’t let men talk down to you. Or demand more of your attention than you’re willing to give, if it interferes with your career goals.

  I say career first, relationships second.

  Notice I said relationships, plural. You’re young. You haven’t achieved your career goals and haven’t made your fortune yet. So, you don’t have kids, you’re not married, and you didn’t buy a home or car. Right? I knew you were smart.

  The old family idea was hard on the breadwinner. Dad or Mom went to work in the morning, and the kids didn’t usually see them until late at night. We survived, but it was hard and because there was a family that required more of our time, there wasn’t an opportunity to try anything else, or take risks.

  The more family time you spend, the less time you will have to devote to your career, and the less chance you will have of success in business.

  On the other hand, the more family time you spend, the happier you will be. Perhaps. But you may not be very happy if your dream goes unfulfilled, or if an important opportunity passes you by because you spent Thanksgiving dishing family secrets at your aunt’s house. In fact, your inability to accomplish your dreams can lead to the destruction of your family—people often take their resentment out on their loved ones. If you pick family over your dream, you may end up losing both.

  Beyond matters of the heart, marriage costs money. Lots of it. Marriage—and divorce, which often follows—will be the biggest financial exposure you will ever have.

  It will also be the biggest financial commitment you will ever make.

  I urge extreme caution. For both man and woman.

  Tread lightly. Marriage is fraught with failure. The statistics are not in your favor. And if and when divorce happens, the couple that once loved each other and swore that they would stay together till death, through thick and thin, through good times and bad times, are the same couple who will try to hurt each other, and fight over money and even their children when it is time to divorce.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Can you even afford to get married?

  I’m going to say it again, in case you’re skimming this book.

  Forgive me for speaking bluntly, but this needs to be said, because you, man and woman, need to go into marriage with open eyes and full disclosure before the fact.

  If you’re a man in your twenties or thirties, and you have yet to make your fortune, I would urge you not to get married. Not yet. You will probably not be able to afford much of anything, other than taking care of yourself.

  Also, let’s be honest here—you’re probably not mature enough to get serious about a committed relationship at this point in your life. I know. I’m a man.

  Remember, for legal reasons, I have to stress this is just my opinion. You’re free to do as you like. I am here just to put the facts as I see them on the table in front of you. What you do with them is up to you.

  If you, the man, get married in your twenties or thirties, you will most likely not be able to support your wife and/or kids. And that’s just if you stay married.

  Statistics tell us that in divorce, the man—if he’s the primary breadwinner—will often pay as much as 50 percent of everything he’s got—gross, pretax—to his former wife. That means that, at the highest tax rate, he will have to earn twice as much to make that money back.

  Don’t get married until you’re mature and secure. If you have no money and no career, taking on the responsibility of supporting a spouse—and children and mortgages and car payments and taxes—just doesn’t make financial sense. It may make you HAPPY. But you will be happy and BROKE, and eventually likely DIVORCED, and then you’ll have to pay even more. There is a hierarchy of needs—feeding yourself comes before self-actualization, and love.

  Whether you stay single or get married, it’s important to have a business plan.

  If you choose to get married, you both need to sign a prenuptial agreement, which outlines how your assets will be divided in the event of a divorce—with each of you receiving advice from your own attorney so it holds up in court. Without a prenup, when the time to divorce comes, lawyers will be whispering in your ear what a bastard or bitch the other was, and then tempers flare and costs go up.

  Better wait until you build your fortune, so you can afford to get married or divorced.

  The only guarantee you have of never getting divorced is never getting married.

  Marriage later.

  First, a successful career.

  Write that down, children.

  And now, a lesson from my personal life. Ladies, unless love overwhelms all logic, don’t marry your beloved in his twenties or thirties. He will let you down. He’s immature. He may look like a man, but—and believe me, I speak from experience here—at that age we’re still just horny little boys on the inside. We’re not as mature as you are. We don’t have the urge to raise children. We just have testosterone. And lots of it.

  Ladies, if you must get married, marry a more mature man of means. The advantages are twofold: a comfortable and safe lifestyle financially, which could mean more freedom for you to pursue your own entrepreneurial goals, and a more mature man who might be emotionally ready for marriage and settling down. Notice that I said “might.” Also, if you divorce a man of means, you won’t have to go back
out into the workforce—you will be able to take more risks with your entrepreneurial goals. Unlike the old model, the comfort of marrying someone of means is not a way to kick back—it is a way to give your own career a jump-start, if things go wrong.

  I repeat: men, especially, don’t get married until after you’ve made significant headway toward your fortune.

  My story?

  I stayed single most of my life, without a regular girlfriend. I had no expenses for gifts, travel, and the other costs that come with a relationship.

  My first real “girlfriend” relationship was with Cher in 1978, when I was almost thirty years old. Cher was and is a great lady. I moved in with Cher to her home in Los Angeles. After a year or so, Cher decided to move to the Malibu Colony, by the beach. At the time, I was busy working on my first solo album. Cher rightfully asked me to share in the overhead, and I gladly did. I still had my penthouse on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, for which I was paying $800 per month. I also didn’t own a car. I had very few financial obligations of any kind. Not to banks. Not to friends. Not to anyone. This, even after KISS was successful. Please take this example to heart—just because you can afford to throw money away, doesn’t mean you have to.

  Later, I was fortunate to have a relationship with Diana Ross. Diana is not only an iconic figure to fans around the world, but a wonderful mother to her children. Sometimes I would stay with her, and sometimes at my place in New York. We were together for two terrific years. In the same vein as Cher, we did not cover each other’s expenses. We were independent, self-sufficient people. And if you can do that, and if something earth-shattering—like love—doesn’t overwhelm your business plan, you should be self-sufficient.

  On August 25, 1984, at an event called Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, I met, and was immediately smitten with, Shannon Tweed. I’m sure you can imagine what the party was like.

  I was awestruck like I had never been by a woman. She was more mature. More grounded. More in tune with what life is really about. And in a short while, Shannon and I began living together. First she moved into my New York place. Then I moved into Shannon’s Los Angeles apartment, where she shared the rent with her sister Tracy and Ruben, their roommate.

  Even though it felt like Shannon would be “the one,” I was cautious. I have always been cautious. Matters of the heart can take over your life.

  After we had lived together for almost two years and had a cohabitation agreement, I decided to buy a home.

  The first thing I did was sell my New York apartment. The market was good, and I was able to sell it for a large profit.

  I had two years of tax-free use of that capital gain, which was the tax law at the time, so I took my time deciding how, when, and where I would make use of that tax advantage.

  It became clearer to me every day that I was falling hard for Shannon, so I decided to buy a home in Los Angeles.

  In 1985, I looked around and finally found a two-acre property in Beverly Hills, with a ranch home and guest house on it. I paid cash, against the advice of my business managers. I could afford it. It was well below my earnings and living standard, but I didn’t like owing money to anyone—even with the advantages of tax deductions on interest and front-loading depreciation. But more on that later.

  Shannon and I lived together for twenty-eight years, without ever having been married. I paid all the bills. Shannon raised the kids. I thought that I never wanted to get married. That’s what I had convinced myself of as a young man.

  It probably had to do with my father’s failings as a businessman, as a father, and as a husband. I decided early on that I would succeed where my father failed.

  Unfortunately, that also led to the thick armor with which I surrounded myself. That armor prevented me from being kind, loving, and open to being loved. I didn’t want to be hurt the way I had been hurt, the way my mother had been hurt.

  So I had to take my own personal journey to connect with matters of my heart, while being duly diligent to keep my business model intact.

  So now I am happily married to my beloved Shannon Tweed Simmons.

  As I write this, Shannon and I have been together for thirty-one years, but we’ve been married for only two years.

  To put it bluntly, she put up with my sorry ass for all those years, and waited for me to gain a semblance of maturity. It took forever. I was arrogant and selfish and self-absorbed. And I’m ashamed at the lack of respect that I showed her, especially because she was the only true love of my life.

  I’m now almost sixty-five years old, and I stayed unmarried until the age of sixty-two. “Will you still need me when I’m sixty-four,” indeed.

  This is all familiar territory, from the chapter about our show. But my point here is this: I found the right partner, who I knew was in this for the right reasons.

  The real truth of why I never got married is that I was afraid. I was afraid of commitment. I was afraid of the financial repercussions.

  And statistics tell us I was right to be afraid, even if I was also afraid of my own unethical action. They say it’s almost always the man who is the cause of the divorce. He either runs out on his family, or he’s not committed enough to the marriage to keep it together. I didn’t want to get married, I thought, because there was a huge financial minefield I would have to walk through. This would be true—if I hadn’t found the right partner, who for years had verified her intentions to me. It took me too long to realize that she was not a risk to my fortune. She made it abundantly clear.

  I was well-read enough to be aware of the community property and cohabitation laws in various states, and I knew all about prenups and other legal maneuvers. I was well aware that holy matrimony was potentially the largest financial exposure I would ever have.

  If I got married without a prenup I would be liable for half of everything I had—that’s pretax, gross.

  Unromantic, I know, but I was afraid.

  I walked into our marriage with open eyes and an open heart.

  And I could afford to get married. Gladly.

  But that didn’t stop me from also having a prenuptial agreement. Prenups are not the most romantic notions in our society. But I see them as positive reinforcements of one’s duties to the relationship. Better to discuss everything out in the open while you’re in love, then if or when the relationship sadly ends. It’s called Full Disclosure Before The Fact. I would urge all couples contemplating marriage to draw up a prenup. Even the most loving, trusting, and honest relationships can come to an acrimonious end and it’s up to me to limit my financial exposure in this litigious society we all live in.

  You must do the same. Find a partner—that word again—who is trustworthy. And make sure you can afford to trust them, in all senses of the word.

  I couldn’t have found a better partner. But I got very, very lucky. Be careful out there.

  THE ART OF MORE: PRINCIPLE #6

  FIND PARTNERS WHO COMPLEMENT YOU

  People who try to do it all themselves are destined for a small, limited venture. No one creates a successful business by themselves. You need guys bringing in new ideas and helping you expand. You can’t do it all. You don’t know it all, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

  Of course, be sure to trust the partners you make. But more important, trust your judgment of people. Your gut will get you far in business. Before I go into a partnership with someone, I spend time talking to others who know them. I have a legal team research them. I watch them in action, how they manage their life, how they speak to their employees. In business, this is referred to as due diligence.

  You must employ due diligence in deciding who you are going to work with, in terms of personality and credibility and reliability, and no matter at what level.

  18

  Brilliant Stupid Ideas/Designing the Right Business Model for You

  “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

  ANONYMOUS
r />   often mistakenly attributed to Confucius

  There are many really stupid ideas that wind up being brilliant, if you can implement them.

  If I had told you in the early seventies that I had a plan to sell bottled water to people, even though water is already free and you can get as much of it as you want by simply turning on your faucet, you probably would have laughed.

  You probably would have been equally unimpressed if I told you that I wanted to get people to pay good money for Pet Rocks, even though you can walk down any street, bend over and pick up a rock, and start treating it as a pet, without paying a cent.

  Yet one of these seemingly stupid ideas made its creator a millionaire, and the other became the foundation of an industry that generates $12 billion annually in the United States alone.

  There are a lot of massively successful businesses that started out as stupid ideas.

  Amazon started selling books online at a time when not many people were using credit cards on the Web.

  Craigslist was free and not well designed.

  Twitter did less than Facebook, and limited the letter count.

  None of these ideas originally sounded like the model for a successful business. In fact, they sounded as crazy and impractical as, say, starting a rock band that wears more makeup and higher heels than your mother.

  Your idea doesn’t have to be original. In fact, it often helps if it’s not.

  But your idea is worthless, unless you figure out how to implement it, how to make it happen.

  That often means you have to create a prototype (in other words, produce the first one as a sample). It also means you have to find the money to do so. And put together your team. And figure out who to sell your product or venture to.

  There are also several questions that you must answer.

  Do you manufacture it yourself?

  Do you raise all the funds to manufacture it yourself?

  Do you launch a local campaign, and once you achieve some success, do you then go to a bigger company and sell all or part of your venture?