Business Brilliant by Lewis Schiff

Author:Lewis Schiff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780062253521
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-18T14:00:00+00:00

7

Spread the Work, Spread the Wealth

NEARLY 9 OUT 0F 10 SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRES SAID THAT WHEN IT COMES TO TASKS THEY ARE NOT EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD AT, THEY ARE VERY LIKELY TO DELEGATE THOSE TASKS TO PEOPLE WHO DO THEM BETTER.

BY CONTRAST, 2 OUT OF 3 MIDDLE-CLASS RESPONDENTS SAID THAT WHEN FACED WITH SUCH TASKS, THEY WOULD LIKELY “DO THOSE TASKS ANYWAY.”

The Disability Advantage

For someone who had barely graduated from high school, fifty-six-year-old Jay Thiessens was doing pretty well for himself back in 1998. He had a beautiful home in Sparks, Nevada, in which he and his wife had raised three children. He owned a fishing boat and a motor home, and his small custom manufacturing company, B&J Machine and Tool, was pulling in $5 million a year.

Thiessens achieved this level of success by making a number of very typical self-made-millionaire moves. He gained an equity stake in his employment at an early age. He broke away and started his own company as soon as he was able. Then he grew the company over the years by plowing cash back into it, instead of saving money for retirement. There was nothing innovative about B&J’s products and the company had no sales staff because it relied on networking and word of mouth to build its clientele. When Thiessens launched B&J in 1971, he put up only $200 of his own money. In a bit of clever deal making, Thiessens persuaded one of his former employers to take on all the risk of financing B&J’s initial equipment and property rental costs.

For most of his life, though, Thiessens harbored what he called “a little secret.” The secret was that Thiessens was illiterate. Thanks to a few lenient teachers and a lot of vocational classes, he was handed a high school diploma in 1962 that he could not read. Over the ensuing years, he developed a kind of mental block about reading and, by the age of fifty-six, he still could not make his way through a children’s book.

Like a lot of illiterate adults, Thiessens was very good at covering up his secret. He had an open and assertive demeanor, mainly because he couldn’t function at work without getting help from his employees. “I could never handle a situation right as it happened,” he told one interviewer. “I had to wait to act on it until the right people were around me.” Most of his workers considered him a good listener with an excellent memory for details, so his aversion to reading and writing seemed to be a mere matter of personal style. They assumed he was too busy during the day to deal with paperwork, when in fact he carried business correspondence home with him each night so that his wife could read it to him in bed.

It was in 1998 that Thiessens finally shared his secret with his employees at a company retreat. Afterward, he found a reading tutor and went public with his news, in hopes of encouraging other adults faced with the same embarrassing problem.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.