One of the benefits of being an Entrepreneur and being in EO is that you get to hang out with interesting people that are creating new and better ways of doing things that make the world a better place. I am in Grand Cayman with internet guru Ridgely Goldsborough who is doing some super cutting edge stuff online.  Take a look as I pick his brain on the special sauce that makes it all work:

I wrote a story that sat in my inbox for about 4 years before it was finally lost in the abyss, but I never forgot it.  The story was about that day 10 years ago, when I was on my way to the Hudson River Club on Vesey Street, right across the street from the World Trade Center.  I thought back then, given the time and insignificance relative to others caught inside the buildings, it was best not to share my story of why or what put me in the path of the terrorists. 

Being the 10^th year of remembrance of 9/11, I have decided to share my story, because to me it relates to freedom and the ability to create, which are key components to entrepreneurism. The WTC also represented commerce, successful business, capitalism and diversity. The mall below the WTC was the highest grossing mall in the country, seeing twice the revenue of the 2^nd highest grossing mall.

As you look at the revised landscape of NYC, you see a masterpiece, created by the hands of some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history…and that was what was being attacked.  This is also why the protection of this freedom, to build and create, is so imperative to the future of our country and this world.

That beautiful morning, I was on the upper Westside as I looked out on the park from my room at the Excelsior hotel.  I was headed out to meet a group of reporters at 9am to discuss my new, unique mutual fund called the iFund, in hopes of gaining some positive publicity.  It was about 8:30 when I came down to grab a cab.  15 minutes and a great deal of frustration later, I had a cab and was on my way.  Little did I know that 15 minutes spent aggravatingly trying to flag down a cab would be my saving grace.

The old town car hauled me down to the financial district, and at that time I wasn’t certain of my exact location.  We drove as I listened to the radio and someone describing a plane going into the tower.  I assumed it was just a small plane…maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something of that nature.  We continued to make our way to lower Manhattan and to the West Side Highway (the major road that runs lengthwise North/South through Manhattan), as another caller on the radio started yelling about another plane hitting a tower, which I couldn’t yet see due to all of the sky scrapers.  As we pulled out on to West Side, my eyes opened wide to the massive smoke and fire coming from the enormous hole in the side of the WTC.

We were the 2^nd car at the first barricade to be stopped on West Side, about 2 miles north of the WTC.  Leaning up to try and stare up into the buildings when the taxi driver asked what was going on.  I told him we were being attacked by terrorists.  Given the moment in time and my knowledge of economics and geopolitics, it seemed the only logical explanation.

As we sat there, I just stared.  I could hear the rescue people coming down the bike path, bypassing all the traffic.  As they slowed to wait for officers to remove some poles, something happened that remains one of my most significant memories.  I looked over at the guys on the fire trucks, and then looked up at the buildings, and back to them. I wondered, seeing the straight and serious looks on their faces, what they were thinking they were getting into.  Being some of the first on the scene, a few hours later I wondered how many of them were still with us.

I tried to continue on my path after police turned us back into the city. When the taxi driver said he would go no further I got out and tried to get on a subway, which was the same subway that goes under the WTC.  It had stopped operating.  I found another taxi that took me in a little further, but he reached a point that he would go no further as well, so I got out and started walking.

 I then came up on a corner that was a clear shot, straight into the hole on the WTC. I stared and then walked again thinking I needed a camera, so I bought one and went back to that corner. I unwrapped the camera, took one photo, and then looked away.  In that moment I heard a gasp sweep across the crowd of people around me, and looked up to see the building fall before my eyes.

As the shock began to wear off, my determination to get to my meeting had dissipated and I began what would be a 5 hour journey back to my hotel room where my girlfriend Robin awaited me.  All taxis, buses and subways had stopped, so everyone was on foot.

A lot happened between standing on that street corner and arriving back at my hotel.  I scrambled to communicate with family members and friends.  News kept coming in of massive attacks.  Even in a sea of people all trying to get out of lower Manhattan, I felt alone.  Some friends at Schwab office in Midtown let me rest my blistered feet for a while.  That evening Robin and I sat in Central park with other New Yorkers, all silent in deep contemplation, confusion and sadness.   Next was the dilemma of making my way back home, or going to Rochester to be with my family.

15 minutes trying to flag down a taxi prevented me from being at the foot of the WTC when the planes exploded into them.  Now we are rebuilding the site, creating a spot of remembrance so that we never forget our freedoms and the world of entrepreneurialism that fell under attack that day.  It is the entrepreneur that is rebuilding and creating a place for others to take risks and create new opportunities and jobs for fellow men.  Thank you and bless all of you still dealing with the loss from the attacks on our great country and the freedoms we stand for.

I am currently at the EO Amsterdam University, which is a 5 day conference packed with amazing speakers (even 2 Nobel Prize Winners), incredible, fun loving, successful entrepreneurs and exciting activities and venues.  One of the most interesting things we’ve done is take a canal ride through the city, making our way through the canal system and on to dinner, where we wore Dutch Clogs.  The really cool thing about this conference, though, is that it’s centered on changing the world and how each of us can do our part to make a difference.  The only thing stopping us is our own self imposed limitations.

Before I go any further, I first want to send out a thank you to those of you who sent me email, texts and Facebook messages about my 9/11 experience.  Your thoughts were very heartfelt and appreciated.  Something I wanted to add to my story is that the following day I rented a car and drove to Rochester, NY to see my family.  I arrived about 30 minutes after my brother Mark delivered his 3rd daughter Ava.  After witnessing so much death and destruction, it was incredibly uplifting to walk into the hospital room and be greeted by my entire family, including the latest addition, baby Ava.  Happy Birthday Ava, and thank you for spreading so much light on all our lives!

Now back to change. I’ve talked a lot about the social aspects of entrepreneurialism, how to approach change and make a positive difference, both personally and professionally.  What we’ve done at the conference is break out into groups to do some creative brainstorming with creative specialists, which proved to be a very stimulating and educational process.  We focused on what brings about change in our lives and what experiences we’ve had that caused major change to take place.  We then discussed what kind of change we would like to see for future generations.

On the topic of change, Dr. Muhammad Yunus spoke to us about change that benefits and empowers poor people around the world.  Yunus is founder of the Grameen movement and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.  He’d heard some years back about people in Bangladesh working with loan sharks in order to purchase things needed to run their businesses and just survive.  The loan sharks were charging interest as high as 1500%.  Yunus went to Bangladesh and pulled together a group of business owners.  When he asked them the total that they had borrowed, combined it came out to be the equivalent of around $43.  He proceeded to loan them the money to repay the loan sharks at no interest.

Once they all paid him back, he gathered others to help raise money to loan the people, who continued to repay him around 98% of what he’d lent.  This was the catalyst that started the Grameen Movement that has raised millions of dollars to be lent to thousands of people as they seek to change and better their own lives.

You might recall my mentioning a desire to start a microfinance opportunity in Pondicherry, India where Efficience has our software development office.  I spoke to Dr. Yunus, who gave me his card and offered to help me.  If you’re seeking something, the universe might just put the right people in your path to help you, so keep your eyes peeled.

I will use this opportunity to do my part and try to create a positive change in the world, to try and help others have better opportunities and hopefully better lives.

How are you changing the world?

Our nation is struggling to create jobs.  You’ve likely heard that regulations have limited businesses’ capital, making it difficult for them to hire or expand.  Have you wondered what types of changes to these regulations would help this economy create more jobs?  Let’s discuss a few key changes that have worked in the past to encourage companies to grow and hire more people.

Many regulations create a big problem for the economy.  Which regulations and policies are stopping us from creating the jobs that we are missing?  Amity Shlaes writes an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy.” 

The first game changer implemented a venture capital investment increase from $39 million in 1977 to $570  million in 1978, an increase of 15 times!  What policy changed?  They cut the capital gains tax rate from 49% to 25%.  In the 1960s, the rate had been raised.  What happened then?  As Amity says, “The mid-1970s were a dead period.”   The decrease in the capital gains tax rate generated investments and growth in businesses, which actually brought in more tax revenue for the government.  

The second big policy change adjusted the ERISA law, which regulated pension and retirement plans.  In 1974, they instituted the prudent man rule, which said that pension plans would be violating their fiduciary responsibility if they invested in risky startup companies like Apple at that time.  They relaxed these regulations in the late 1970s, and as a result, more money was invested in small, younger start-up companies that create most of the jobs, as I discussed in an earlier blog post. 

The third major policy change centered around intellectual property rights and clarified how ideas in universities and research departments could be sold or used for commercial benefit.  Subsequently, so many great ideas surfaced after having been pushed aside on a desk or stuffed into a file cabinet simply because, until that moment, no one had the incentive to go out and reap the benefits.

The lessons here are plentiful!  We need to continue to lower the cost of capital transactions and capital gains.  When we take from the people with capital, we always get slow growth or dead periods, not more jobs or government revenue.  Amity suggests the major regulations of today include Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley.  We need to change these policies and reduce the burdens they place on businesses. 

Most entrepreneurs understand this instinctively, but we need to share this data with others.  Shout it out loud and clear to the policy makers because this information is vital if their real agenda is to create jobs and improve the economy and not just to maintain power.

Many of us out there hold a strong aversion and distaste for meetings. You have heard it before, or possibly even said it yourself: “We do nothing but have meetings around here, so how am I to get any work done?” Why do we have such negative feelings in regards to getting a group of people together to discuss issues and create solutions to move forward?

I believe strongly in the power of the group and think it is vital to bring people together to create the best ideas. If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you have seen me discuss my belief in collective intelligence, an ideal I trust in so much that I even started a mutual fund managed around the philosophy.

When you imagine a good idea occurring, what do you envision? Do you see Einstein with his crazy hair looking up into the sky with a light bulb going off? Do you visualize the lonely scientist looking into a microscope, and then Eureka . . . It happens?

I read about a study in Steve Johnson’s book “Where Good Ideas Come From / The Natural History of Innovation” and was not surprised to find it shows that good ideas happen not in these moments of individual discovery but when a group of people are sitting around a table sharing ideas. I said to myself, “Holy moly Batman! Now I have real evidence to support my gut!”

Psychologist Kevin Dunbar actually set up cameras to watch a research group of scientists work in the early 1990s. His team transcribed all the interactions and tracked the flow of information. Dunbar discovered the physical location where the most important breakthroughs occurred — the MEETING ROOM!

They found the group interactions helped reconceptualize the problem. In his book, Johnson explains, “questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level.” Group interactions allowed the more surprising finds to be questioned rather than dismissed, and this led to better ideas and breakthroughs.

So there we have it! Those all day quarterly meetings we have in order to focus, strategize, and plan along with our two day off-site annual meeting have purpose! This can also be said for any other meeting where you need important decisions made or　great ideas from your team. If for some reason the team has doubts, get the book! It is a great piece of evidence.

If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim CollinsPeter DruckerIPS Millennium Fund i

In Great by Choice, Collins and Hansen set up an awareness of how three key areas acted as the common themes in the companies that have dealt with uncertainty, chaos, and luck as well as why some companies thrive despite all this. What they found was very interesting and contradicts common thinking about great companies. They discovered what they call 10Xers (companies that have been beating the marketing and comparison firms by at least 10 times in stock market performance) were not more visionary, more bold, more risk taking, more innovative, or more creative than the comparison companies.

They were more of 3 things:

1) More Disciplined

2) More Empirical

3) More Paranoid

This book is very eye opening! When we think of a company that has had great success, we usually assume it has done so with a new break through idea, a new patent, or by taking a big risk that is paying off. However, this was not the case. Of course, to a point, these companies were innovative and creative, but they became really great by finding what works through empirical evidence, testing that out, and then being super disciplined to get it done. They also worried excessively about what was out there that could change the game for them.

I will discuss each in more detail in next week’s blog. Happy New Year, and I wish you much success this year being worried about what is coming, gathering evidence that your ideas work, and implementing them with vigorous discipline.

When you run a business, various opportunities often present themselves and persuade you to run off in different directions, pulling you away from your focus.  This happens to me frequently, and I find it difficult to avoid being sucked down a path that sounds like the next great avenue for huge success.

Thankfully, my partners, EO Forum,  or my team usually slap me back into reality.  Taking a closer look at what you are doing can also help you discover if these opportunities are worthy or if the current focus is best.

As my success coach Steve D’Annunzio asks:  Where have the most profitable clients come from over the past 3 months?  What is the common theme across those clients and what is it you are providing that makes the clients happy to pay you?  What is the common size of these clients?  What category are they generally from?  What are their locations?

If the answers point towards the companies paying me the most profit, why would I not want to go get more of the same?  Why would I not want to build on this synergy and find a way to get the most scalability possible by giving the clients what they love while also getting paid at the most profitable level?

Steve tells me that when those things happen, you are in “FLOW.”  When it’s right, you notice it in the areas of time, energy and currency because they will all be jamming together like a great jazz band or orchestra.

As we close in on the end of the year, many businesses are looking deeper at what they are doing and may be considering these same types of questions.  Another beneficial exercise that can help to open your awareness to all the options is the basic Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats or SWOT analysis.  We utilize this every quarter to challenge our business and ensure we are considering all possibilities and are not about to get eaten by something sitting around the corner waiting to pounce.  Remember the Software Monster.

We found that we spent too much time gathering data from all the participants for SWOT, leaving us little time to really dig into the data we had pulled out.  To fix this, we built a tool that has helped us ramp this up before we start our planning meeting and has given us much more time to go deeper.  This tool, called MeetingHabits, can now be utilized for free, and it may stay that way as we study how it benefits us.  We would also like hearing how it helps you if you would like to share your experiences.

As you work to focus more on bringing the most value to a core group of clients that will put you in the best FLOW, what are you doing to make sure your business is harmonizing the best tune?

When I was about 13 years old I had a neighbor named John Buckholtz. Mr. Buckholtz made clown shoes for a living, a family business that dated back to 1873. His grandfather was Raymond Griffin, the son of James R. Griffin, who originally founded Griffin Theatrical Shoe Co. By the time the business was handed down to Mr. Buckholtz, he was one of less than a handful of clown shoemakers in the world, and arguably the only one who still custom made them by hand.

Occasionally I would do yard work for Mr. Buckholtz for extra money. Over time he recognized my work ethic and desire to learn, so one day he offered to teach me how to make clown shoes. With my mother’s permission and a nervous enthusiasm, I accepted, unaware of what was in store for me.

I’ve attended EO Universities for several years now, but this year was unlike any I’ve ever attended. I went for the first time to Barcelona, Spain. The theme of the University was “Design Your Life”. The idea was to focus on what you really want out of life, and what you’re doing to get there. It’s like choosing a personal BHAG – your very own Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

As entrepreneurs, we set goals all the time, but experience has taught me that we tend to view are business goals and life goals as one in the same; that by reaching our business goals we receive all we want out of life. Shouldn’t our businesses really be the means to our personal goals and the life legacies we want to create? This isn’t the case, in that, more often than not we let our businesses consume our lives and distract us from our families, spousal relationships, and our own personal paths.

While there I attended programs on knowing your limits, and designing your personnel life plan. Verne Harnish introduced the personal one page plan, or the ME page. We discussed things like, “How important is money?” and “How much is enough?” Social entrepreneurs were a common topic, as well as finding strength in all the challenges of life and business.

A fellow entrepreneur, Nando Parrado, gave a testimonial on the Miracle in the Andes, his story of surviving 72 days when they knew no one was coming. Nando and one of his Rugby mates inspired us with strength and courage with their fight against the cold and mountains. They hiked over 40 miles of nasty terrain to find help and see the team they left behind get rescued. On a scale of 1 to 10, this story was a 15…and is to be continued in a later blog.

I began working on my own BHAG on this trip, and I made a commitment to create 3 very deep relationships that will help me grown and be a strong resource for me in good and bad times. Keith Farrazzi talks about this in his new book, who’s got your back. Working on personal goals has been eye opening for me and has allowed me to combine my thoughts about my life with the success of my business in a way that brings more meaning and satisfaction to all that I do!

Whether you are just starting out, or you’ve already achieved success in your business, have you thought about the major accomplishments you want above all else in your life? Look at it like this: If you were a big ship leaving behind a wake that rippled through all those you pass by, one day when you looked back at that wake, how do you want to have affected those you’ve passed? How do you want them to remember that wake?

The people (it is always mostly about the people) and the speakers in this beautiful city of Barcelona, caused me to stop and have some serious contemplation about my future.

If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim CollinsPeter DruckerIPS Millennium Fund i

In Great by Choice, Collins and Hansen set up an awareness of how three key areas acted as the common themes in the companies that have dealt with uncertainty, chaos, and luck as well as why some companies thrive despite all this. What they found was very interesting and contradicts common thinking about great companies. They discovered what they call 10Xers (companies that have been beating the marketing and comparison firms by at least 10 times in stock market performance) were not more visionary, more bold, more risk taking, more innovative, or more creative than the comparison companies.

They were more of 3 things:

1) More Disciplined

2) More Empirical

3) More Paranoid

This book is very eye opening! When we think of a company that has had great success, we usually assume it has done so with a new break through idea, a new patent, or by taking a big risk that is paying off. However, this was not the case. Of course, to a point, these companies were innovative and creative, but they became really great by finding what works through empirical evidence, testing that out, and then being super disciplined to get it done. They also worried excessively about what was out there that could change the game for them.

I will discuss each in more detail in next week’s blog. Happy New Year, and I wish you much success this year being worried about what is coming, gathering evidence that your ideas work, and implementing them with vigorous discipline.