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Johnny Georges refused to raise his prices on Shark Tank and it's exactly why he got the deal. Johnny came on the show asking for $150,000 for 20% of Tree-T-Pee, a product he sells to farmers for their trees. The Sharks zeroed in on his pricing right away. He sells each unit for just $5. "Why only $5? Why not charge 10 or 12 or 15?" Johnny's answer told you everything about who he is: "Because I'm working with farmers and they're not buying one. They're buying 20,000." He makes just a dollar on each one. Pushed again on why he wouldn't charge $7, his reasoning was disarmingly simple: "Well, I've never done that. I've always tried to be right." One Shark tried to walk him through the brutal math of scaling. As a distributor, the margins just didn't work: "I can't get involved with you because there's not enough margin for me as a distributor. I need to be able to sell it for $12 at least so that I can make some profit and you can make some profit… now there's two of us, two mouths to feed." Johnny pushed back: "Yeah, but you're selling to farmers." The Shark saw the trap clearly. Johnny believed every tree that goes in the ground should have a Tree-T-Pee but he couldn't be everywhere at once: "In order for that to happen, I'd need a lot of Johnnies. There's only one of you. I need like 2,000 Johnnies calling on farmers all across the land. Now, who's going to pay them?"* He went out. But what looked like a fatal flaw to one Shark looked like integrity to another. JP saw something worth backing: "Farmers are the cornerstone of America. There may be a lot of farmers out there that can't afford $12 per tree, but maybe they could afford $6 or $7. I'm going to give you everything you're asking for. Your $150,000 for 20%. What you're doing is right, and you deserve the chance to make it big and do a lot of good." The deal closed on a handshake and a "God bless America." The same conviction that made Johnny look uninvestable to one Shark made him irresistible to another. He wasn't optimising for margin, he was optimising for farmers. And staying true to that mission didn't cost him the deal. It got him one.
Business Nerd230,114 просмотров • 10 дней назад
Amjad Masad's first "business meeting" was getting caught hacking his own university: Before he built anything, Amjad was stuck. He was five, almost six years into a degree that should have taken three or four, watching everyone around him move on. "All my friends were graduating... And I feel like life is passing me by." The drive was already there. It just had no outlet. "I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I wanted to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was stuck." The thing standing between him and graduation wasn't his ability. He passed his classes, and did well in math and computer science. It was an attendance rule. Miss too many classes in a row and you'd be disqualified. A bureaucratic problem, not an intellectual one. So he treated it like an engineer, not a student: "I thought, okay, I'm going to hack into the school and change my grades." He spent two to three weeks in his parents' basement building the solution. Writing scripts, running network scans, probing the systems until he was in. He didn't cover his tracks and disappear. He told the school he had something to show them, walked into a room full of deans, and pitched: "I pulled out the whiteboard and explained all the different problems, all the systems they had and how I hacked into it and really pulled out all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed." That's the move. He turned a liability into a demonstration. The deans had stayed up all night trying to figure out what went wrong, and here was the one person who could explain it, selling them on his competence in the process. He almost overplayed it, assuming the presentation alone had settled things and reaching for the door: "Wait, where are you going? We've got to deal with you. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go." What turned it around was a decision-maker who could tell the difference between a vandal and a builder. The university president didn't see a crime to punish; he saw talent to manage. "You have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility." And then he made the offer that, in hindsight, looks a lot like Amjad Masad first job: "We're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues." The business lesson is in that final trade. Amjad created value the wrong way then proved he could create it the right way, and got hired to do exactly that. The skill that broke the system became the skill that secured it.
Business Nerd16,999 просмотров • 17 дней назад
Jeff Bezos on why he protects his mornings, his sleep, and his decision-making: Bezos is asked about his unusual routine. No meetings before 10 a.m., eight hours of sleep, no PowerPoints. He walks through the philosophy behind it. He starts with the morning: "I like to putter in the morning. I get up early. I go to bed early. I get up early. I like to putter in the mornings. I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school." That puttering time, he says, is non-negotiable. It's why his first meeting is at 10. And the timing of meetings isn't accidental either: "I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch. Like anything that's going to be really mentally challenging, that's a 10 o'clock meeting. And because by 5:00 p.m. I'm like, I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10:00 a.m." Then he gets to sleep. He prioritises eight hours, and frames it not as self-care but as a job requirement: "I think better. I have more energy. My mood is better… As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you're tired or grouchy or any number of things?" Bezos is careful to note this isn't universal advice. A 100-person startup is a different story. But Amazon isn't a startup, and at his level the math changes, fewer decisions, higher stakes, longer time horizons. Which leads to the part of the philosophy that ties it all together. He doesn't think his executives should be focused on the current quarter at all: "They work in the future. They live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter… We'll have a good quarterly conference call and Wall Street will like our quarterly results and people will stop me and say, 'Congratulations on your quarter,' and I say thank you. But what I'm really thinking is that quarter was baked 3 years ago. Right now I'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself in 2021 sometime." The whole system, the slow morning, the protected sleep, the morning-only hard meetings, the three-year horizon points at one thing: "If I make like three good decisions a day, that's enough."
Business Nerd15,340 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Marketing is the most important skill in the world. But no one teaches you about it. I just found the 12 Greatest Marketing Videos ever. These will teach you more than a $169,000 marketing degree. Like + Comment "Videos" and I'll DM you the link. (Must Be Following Me)
Business Nerd67,953 просмотров • 2 лет назад
The greatest lesson on storytelling ever by the creators of South Park:
Business Nerd32,238 просмотров • 1 год назад
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