Kevin Maloney was a youngster, his mother worked in the super computer division of California Institute of Technology, a world-re­nowned science university in Pasadena, California. Scientists and engi­neers were always around Kevin’s house. He even washed their cars. Kevin listened to their discussions about research in such futuristic areas as nanotechnology. Throughout high school and college, Kevin kept these mentors up to date with his education and career.

“Every few years I’d send notes—’I'm off to grad school.’ ‘I’m start­ing a business.’—I was pleasantly aggressive,” Kevin recalls. “Business comes down to relationships, how you relate to people. I have always net­worked. I’m happily surprised so many people are willing to help young people. It comes down to personality and persistence.”

After earning an MBA from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Califor­nia, receiving two patents for his invention, and working in several invest­ment and capital management companies, Kevin became chief executive at Quantum Sphere, a fledgling nanotechnology company in Costa Mesa, California. This industry works with nanos, which are three to five atoms in length. A human hair is 100,000 times thicker. Materials made that small have different properties than their super-sized versions, conjuring amazing images of the information from millions of books being stored on a device the size of a sugar cube.

But Quantum Sphere wasn’t concentrating on those future promises but rather on practical products that could turn a profit quickly, such as zinc oxide nano-powder for cosmetics.

Kevin took his plans to a couple of his mentors, Marc Goroff and Jon Faiz Kayyem, both PhDs from Cal Tech and founders of separate technol­ogy companies.

“I didn’t ask for money. I asked for direction and advice,” Kevin says. “They were so willing to share information and excited about my ambi­tious plans. After a couple of hours of conversation, they said, ‘How can we get involved in this?’”

They listened because they knew and liked Kevin, but they asked about investing because his concept was strong. Although Kevin is a pleas­ant and intelligent man with a good resume, that goes only so far with men­tors. They’re more willing to part with advice than money.

“You can’t just be a nice guy,” Kevin says. “You have to have a solid plan, a solid business.”

Faiz says he put money into Quantum Sphere because “it wasn’t fo­cused on ‘stake your turf,’ ‘own your space,’ and a quick IPO [initial pub­lic offering]. Others in nanotechnology talk about fanciful ideas that might not come to pass. Quantum Sphere knows there’s a market for these parti­cles (it manufactures) and passed its first goals early.”

Faiz also is impressed with how closely Quantum Sphere watches its budget. It bought $76,000 in equipment for $4,000 at a bankruptcy sale. The company used its initial investment to build a reactor to produce nanoproducts at a profit before a couple of its venture-backed competitors.

In the late 1990s, technology companies could raise tens of millions of dollars from venture capitalists and go public without generating any rev­enue related to actual products. That era ended with the dot-com crash and is unlikely to return anytime soon. Instead, companies like Quantum Sphere are growing with fiscal discipline and the strength of relationships with mentors and other equity investors.

“We’re positioning ourselves as a nano manufacturer that actually de­livers products,” Kevin says.

Dennis Myers is an industrial engineer with expertise in metal work­ing who has jumped back and forth between corporate America and entrepreneurship throughout his career. After Dennis built up a division to grind and sharpen the extremely small drills used by the circuit board industry, his employer decided to drop the line of work. So Dennis started Facet In­dustries to do the job.

“I needed some minimum-experienced people and a place to locate the operation,” Dennis says. “I worked out a deal with an agency that rehabil­itated disabled and handicapped people in Mission Viejo, California. In ex­change for my business employing some of their people, they provided free a facility and a supervisor, who was a college graduate, who aided in training the workers.”

The rehabilitation agency didn’t give Facet Industries capital, but gave space rent free and training supervision, saving the capital Facet Industries did have for other uses.

“All in all, it was worth thousands of dollars a month to me and a steady source of employees. They were some of my best employees and the most reliable,” Dennis adds. “I paid the workers so I was providing jobs and training. That was the payoff for the rehabilitation agency.”

Much of the work at Facet Industries was detailed and repetitive. The drills were the size of a pin, so grinding was detailed work. They needed to be cleaned and then shaped on a semi-automatic machine. Some of his workers were developmentally disabled but capable of doing the repeti­tious work under the tutelage of the supervisor.

“They worked hard and didn’t have bad habits that some workers bring to the workplace,” Dennis says. Some of his able-bodied workers would walk off the job after a couple of days never returning even to pick up their paycheck. In contrast, Dennis remembers one rehabilitation worker who learned to use a micrometer to check the size of each drill and sorted them into bins according to size. He never missed a day of work and sometimes even stood in the rain waiting for Dennis to open the doors.

Every state has state and federal funding to help reeducate and train people who are injured and can no longer work at the jobs they held prior to being injured and to train the physically and developmentally disabled. Most states have rehabilitation training centers and sheltered workshops and seek contracts with companies in the community that need assembly, sorting, collating of printed materials, labeling, and bulk mailing services.

Some states permit below-minimum-wage jobs, paying the workers ac­cording to the labor they can do. For example, if a supervisor can assemble six chairs in an hour and the rehabilitation client can assemble one, then the client-worker earns a sixth the standard wage for that job.

The work­shops even market for the contracts, just as other private businesses would. Some rehabilitation specialists strive to have the training and jobs at sites in the community where a company’s other employees work, so that the disabled have interaction with a broader cross-section of their neighbors.

After several years, Dennis closed Facet Industries and moved on to other executive industrial assignments and businesses. Today he’s an ex­ecutive coach and industrial consultant. He still says his rehabilitation workers were among the most reliable he ever had. “The biggest underuti­lized resource[s] in American business are the disabled and elderly work­ers,” he says.

Every contract is a potential cash flow killer at Cougar Turbine Sup­ply LP in Conroe, Texas. The company buys, refurbishes, and resells used Solar turbines and engines at prices ranging from $300,000 to $1 million or more. One overhaul can take four months. If the turbine seller won’t ac­cept extended terms for the purchase price, then Cougar must get part of or the entire resale price up front from the buyer, says President Allen Shearer. “It’s devastating to our cash flow to have a piece of equipment at those prices sitting in our shop for four months.”

Allen and his two partners must carefully negotiate every contract to buy an engine or turbine or to find, overhaul, and sell a specific piece of equipment for Cougar Turbine Supply to make the most of its capital and avoid costly borrowing.

Cougar’s customers are oil and natural gas companies around the world. Only a handful of competitors have the financial resources and the technical expertise to buy and overhaul the expensive machinery that Cou­gar’s customers need.

“If we have extra cash, we might buy surplus equipment without hav­ing an immediate buyer for it because we can get equipment much cheaper if it’s not needed,” Allen says. “A turbine might cost me $75,000. But as soon as the seller knows I have a contract and need the equipment right away, the price might be $300,000.1 get much better terms if they need to sell rather than I need to buy.”

More often, Allen does not buy equipment until he receives an order from an oil or gas company. When Allen gets an order for a specific turbine or engine, he builds into the delivery date the time it will take to overhaul the equipment and perhaps a little time to find the machine, “but the cus­tomer needs it so it won’t wait forever for delivery,” he says. Allen nego­tiates with the customer to pay as much of the contract up front as possible, which is sometimes delicate because the customer is trying to preserve as much of its cash as possible as well.

“It’s tough being a small company with limited capital in this indus­try,” he says of Cougar, which has 15 employees and 2003 sales in excess of $9 million. “Our competitors are General Electric and other giants. They don’t have the financial constraints to overcome like we do but they have a lot of red tape and can’t make decisions quickly like we can.”

Cougar remains focused on just one product line, rather than many, “which gives us less diversification, but does allow us to be the experts, which benefits our customers,” Allen says. That expertise enables Cougar to manufacture many specialized components used in the overhaul of Solar engines or turbines that customers can’t get anywhere else.

Cougar’s fast growth has been another restriction on the company’s capital. Banks have been nervous that with contracts carrying such large price tags that the company is using its line of credit for operating capital instead of revolving purposes. “Bankers don’t understand rapid growth like ours, and every year when our line of credit comes up for renewal we spend three weeks justifying what we do,” Allen says. “You have to be very careful. It’s hard to pull back on the reins, which entrepreneurs don’t like to do, and not to grow too fast.”

That challenge makes careful negotiation of contract terms with every supplier and customer all the more important for Cougar’s continued fi­nancial strength.

The answer, of course, is that the wealthy receive their unearned income, or not directly earned at least. They have other people or things working for them. Notice how the famous British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson is always embarking on adventures, balloon trips and the like, and yet his businesses still flourish. He is not on the highest salary in Britain and none of the written works on him suggest anywhere that a high salary was his goal. His wealth does not come through salary. Imagine a race between you and me right now. The challenge is to see who can dig the biggest hole in one hour.

You go first, pick up the spade and get digging fast, taking no pauses for breath in the whole hour. I pick up my spade and pass it to ten rather big guys who start digging.

Sorry, I won!

Ridiculous example, showing how ridiculous you are trying get rich by digging the hole all by yourself. I let you off easy: next time I am going to hire a JCB for each of them. It’s a simple business principle that the Americans call leverage. It is why very few people get to be rich before 65, if then, by working for someone else. That is why you should stop digging and make better plan.

In the world of the entrepreneur, the main measure of success ‘ profit. Having a flash car or a plush office, is not a measure a success, it is the measure of someone who wants to be seen a successful. They are hangover habits from being an employee, uniform you need to change as you escape.

It can take any adult less than five minutes to register a company online and appoint themselves as Managing Director and main shareholder. I see so many people rush to the printers to have their new status printed on their cards. It counts for nothing and is really dangerous as your thinking is still in a world where titles count for something.

Entrepreneurs are quite like farmers: they till the soil, they plant the seed, they pray for rain and, if all goes to plan, they still know they will have no income for several months. So when they do have a good crop they store some resources to get through the lean periods. They know that work today will be paid several months, even years, into the future. I am not surprised that, although I did not know beforehand, two of the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed were brought up on a farm. I think that good business lessons, which the rest of us had to learn, were ingrained in them at early age.

Employees say, ‘How can I pay my mortgage, bills, live, while am building a business if I don’t raise finance to cover this?’ am not going to answer that question because it is the wrong question. You need an entrepreneur mindset and when you have this you will stop asking this question. You need to start thinking like someone in business to make a profit and grow capital wealth. You will find ways to cut costs and get sales ‘ fast. You will find ways to make a smooth transition. You need to realize that the house you live in is not an asset. You need to realize that paying off the mortgage should not be your top priority. Don’t you find it interesting that property investors tend to prefer interest only mortgages? Why do you think that might be? Could it be that they are using mortgage finance as leverage and thus want as much of it as possible? See, it is a different way of thinking. Again, ‘How can I pay my mortgage off in two years?’ is the wrong question.

An asset is something that makes you money, a liability is something that costs you money. Focus on building assets and reducing liabilities and you will do fine in business for yourself. Your house and car cost you money; shares, businesses and rental property make you money. I suggest you read Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad to explore this point further.

“I have never not been paid by any client,” Deborah says. That result is not accidental. Arose Recruiting has a careful and con­sistent system for collecting receivables in a timely way. The vast majority of people and companies do pay their bills on time.

However, the longer a bill is unpaid, the less likely it will be paid. The Commercial Law League of America says that 74 percent of bills delinquent for three months are paid. Less than 29 percent of those a year late are ever paid. So the quicker the vendor is to peruse overdue receivables, the better.

Overdue receivables are more than a nuisance. The unpaid supplier is in reality making an interest-free loan to the customer. Also the supplier’s cash flow is hurt so it may have to sell or borrow against its receivables, which costs money. Capital tied up in unpaid receivables is a missed op­portunity to invest that money in personnel, equipment, or facilities.

A company can’t have capital invested in an asset that earns nothing. Even modest improvements in accounts receivable collection can be big money. If a company with $3.4 million in receivables can cut the average payment lag from 50 days to 35 days, it reaps $1 million in improved cash flow.

Deborah is very careful about whom she accepts as clients. When po­tential clients contact Arose Recruiting or one of the salespeople brings in new clients, they are checked out with Dun & Bradstreet and banking ref­erences.

These new clients know that Deborah expects to be paid promptly. A clear credit policy is the foundation for good customer relations and timely payments. Clients are more willing to accept a policy consistently and equally applied than if you let them slide and then change tactics later. You should charge interest on the overdue amount.

However, past laxness does not doom your company to late-paying customers forever. Begin at once to adhere to your credit terms with new customers and to work diligently to bring existing customers into compliance. Call them immediately when a bill is due and remind them of the terms while reaffirming how important they are to your company.

“I had a client that was an agency like Arose Recruiting, and when it was late paying, I called,” Deborah says. “Their clients hadn’t paid them. I said, ‘I don’t do business with companies that don’t pay their bills. I cut you off.’ I’m real harsh about that. It’s hard to stay in business if you don’t get paid.”

Some companies encourage swift payment by offering discounts for invoices paid early. A common offer is 2 percent discount if paid within ten days of the invoice date. Occasionally, a customer will pay the dis­counted price after 30 days. It’s vital not to allow that liberty. Discounts must be earned.

Require delinquent customers to pay cash on delivery of more prod­ucts or services plus a percentage of the past-due amount until the account is current. If the customer won’t commit to an acceptable payment plan or make subsequent payments on time, turn them over to an outside collec­tions firm.

“You cannot survive in business if you don’t have good receivable col­lections,” Deborah says. “A lot of business owners hate to turn clients away, but you have to be conservative about whom you do business with.”

Jim Winterle was a well-respected broker of mail services for major package delivery companies, when some of his big customers asked why he didn’t start a company to consolidate the international mail from many companies in order to get high-volume shipping discounts. He agreed if these customers would support him with their international mail business. Jim opened International Delivery Solutions (IDS) LLC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1999.

With just six employees in the beginning, IDS couldn’t waste time or personnel. Efficiency was—and is—the key to profitability and success. So Jim has a program to maximize productivity that has enabled IDS to handle with just 40 employees 400,000 pounds of mail each month to Can­ada and 125,000 pounds to other countries.

Productivity improvement is a popular concept in companies of all sizes. Productivity improvements include eliminating redundancy and inef­ficiencies, doing work faster, buying lower-cost materials, and keeping the workforce as lean as possible. During the 1990s, new technology—fax ma­chines, computers, cell phones, copiers that collate and staple documents automatically, and the Internet—enabled huge productivity gains in compa­nies that made the right investments. At the same time, the amazing reduc­tion in price of so much of the technology further boosted profitability. However, companies need to be careful not to sacrifice quality in pursuit of lower prices, or declining sales will neutralize any productivity gains.

But maximizing productivity doesn’t happen by chance, Jim says. At IDS, maximizing productivity depends on hiring experienced workers and constantly training them, setting goals, keeping good records, centralizing processes, and becoming ever more automated.

Experienced workers are more efficient than novices. From the start, Jim had key people in mind to hire as soon as the company could afford them.

“We also set work goals and incentive people with money,” Jim says. “If they hit efficiency goals, they receive a bonus. The bonus for shop work­ers is based on how much mail they can process measured by number of pieces and weight. Management staff bonuses are based on profitability.”

Everyone in the company must work together to achieve the greatest efficiencies, Jim adds. The shop workers have to have mail to work with. If the sales staff doesn’t bring in enough mail, the entire process is ineffi­cient.

IDS must keep good records in order to identify bottlenecks in the pro­duction process and sales personnel who aren’t meeting their goals. The company bought ACT! contact management software to improve the sell­ers’ efficiency and bought MAS 90 accounting software to improve finan­cial tracking throughout the operation.

To centralize the mail processing for maximum efficiency, IDS has distribution centers in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Niagara Falls, Ontario. “Also, the more automated we can get with machinery, the more productive we are,” Jim says. “The mail consolidation industry started with hand work and now most of it is done by machine. I don’t want to lose good employees by automation, so we grow the business to keep the employees we have busy, but we don’t have to hire new ones.”

In the early 1980s, the trucking industry was struggling with the im­pact of federal deregulation and a poor economy. The owner of a ten-em­ployee repair shop for truck trailers in St. Charles, Missouri, wanted to sell the business, but not only couldn’t get a good price, he could not find a buyer at all. Joe Helmsing, who had worked for the seller many years, de­cided this was the time to fulfill his lifelong dream of business ownership. So he stepped in to buy Craftsmen Industries Inc. in 1982.

Although some people told Joe that the tiny repair shop could not be saved, “I thought I could turn it around,” he explains. “I knew the company had some skilled people, and I believed we could do more with this business than just repair trailers.”

Because the seller couldn’t get any other deal, he provided the financ­ing for Joe to buy the company—primarily its inventory—for $50,000.

The majority of small, private businesses cannot be sold when the owner wants to leave or retire. It is common, therefore, for the seller to take back a note to help finance all or part of the sale. One advantage is that it gives the buyer some reassurance that the sellers believe that the business can thrive without them. A bigger reason for seller financing is that the deal wouldn’t happen without it. Most banks have strict lending criteria for business acquisition loans.

The seller can accept more lenient qualification standards for the buyer than a bank would and a more flexible payment schedule, interest rate, loan period, and other terms. Some sellers will pro­tect their continued investment in a company they no longer control by re­quiring the buyer to take out a life insurance policy with the seller as the beneficiary.

Most sellers do not want to be tied to their former companies for many years, so seller financing is usually for seven years or less. Such a deal might be structured with a balloon payment at the end, paid by a new loan after the new owner has built a successful track record and financials to show a lending institution.

In the case of Craftsmen Industries, Joe paid off the seller in the second year of running the company. He was able to turn the small business around, “but it took a long time; no one wanted to hear my story for 15 years,” he says.

Joe’s strategy was to expand Craftsmen Industries beyond its trailer re­pair roots. The company began painting trailers as well as repairing them. Then it began designing and building specialty trailers, including the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile and the Sony PlayStation touring trailer.

Craftsmen Industries added mobile display units, vehicle graphics, banners, and signs to its list of products. It started selling and servicing new and used trailers. It now sells more than 1,500 trailers a year, accounting for a third of its business. The payroll has grown to 215 employees.

“I believe you must continue to drive and push the company to grow,” Joe says. “I don’t want all my eggs in one basket, whether it is with one customer, one product, or one area.”

After struggling as an independent brick-and-mortar retailer in the early 1990s, Daniel Thralow in 1996 discovered the power of the Internet, which was then in its infancy. He set up a text-only site as an experiment to promote his sunglasses-only store in Duluth, Minnesota, and started getting orders from all over the country.

But Dan was getting about 10 percent of the sunglasses back from customers who didn’t like the product when they put the sunglasses on, so he added nonwearable products, such as binoculars and telescopes, which had a return rate of just 3 percent. By 1999, Thralow Inc. was selling $3.5 million in products, mostly through http://www.peep ers.com, http://www.binoculars.com, and http://www.telescopes.com, and made the Inc. magazine list of 500 fastest growing privately owned companies in America. Product suppliers were willing to give Dan merchandise and wait as long as 180 days to be paid without charging any interest.

“The dollar amount and length of time they extend varies,” Dan says, “but even a young company that can sit down with vendors and explain how it will sell product will get at least 30 days to pay for $3,000 or $5,000 in merchandise. And if you do well selling their product, there’s no reason not to increase the terms. We would not have grown as fast as we did with­out vendor lines of credit.”

Dan sold his company in 1999 for cash and stock in the buying com­pany, which went bankrupt following the dot-com crash. In 2001 Dan got his company back along with a bad reputation among vendors who had not been paid.

“I had to fly out and visit vendors in person,” Dan says. “I offered to pay cash on delivery just to keep their products, and some still didn’t want to do business with me even though I reminded them that I had paid on time when I was in charge of the company.”

Dan had to establish new relationships with other vendors to wipe away the tarnished reputation and prove himself and Thralow Inc. worthy of vendors’ trust and lines of credit. Slowly he has been able to win back all the former vendors. Even so, some companies harbor hard feelings. “I order $1 million in product from one company, and they still sting from and bring up the $30,000 they were not paid in 2000. It is said that customers are golden, and they are. But your suppliers are just as golden. Some prod­ucts sell themselves because of their brand name. You have to be good to those suppliers and keep your word.”

Thralow Inc. now has 25 employees. In addition to its own Internet re­tail sites, the company links its database of 33,000 products to 11 sites owned by others whose primary products complement Thralow binoculars and telescopes, such as outdoor clothing. Thralow Inc. provides the call centers and order fulfillment for these other sites, which maximizes the use of Thralow’s staff and warehouse space, multiplies sales, and helps control retail prices for the products. These other small Internet sites benefit from Dan’s success in rebuilding relationships with hundreds of vendors and rely on his ability to keep generous lines of credit with these vendors by delivering on his promises.

1 profit level
2 current profit multiples in your sector
3 state of the market
4 premium for branding
5 premium for desirability
6 your negotiating skills
7 size of the enterprise.

Profit level
The valuation of a small business can be a complex subject. The market, however, like most things in business likes to keep it simple. Thus the initial valuation of your business is a multiple of profits. So if your business is making $150,000 profit per year (after drawing a market management salary cost) and the current multiple is 5 then your business will go up for sale probably around $750,000. Any specific asset, like property, being additional to that.

A buyer will want to see a lot more detail: track record over last few years, market potential, etc. If the profit was higher in the last two years it suggests a declining market.

So as an owner from three years before a sale you want to start manipulating the figures to increase the profitability. This means that major investment, which reduces profit in the short and medium term will reduce the market value of the business. A new buyer will also be looking for ways that he or she can grow the business. So anything that suggests the business can be expanded will fetch a premium.

Current profit multiples in your sector
Multiples are set by the market. They vary probably between about 4 and 12 depending on sector, size of the business and current market conditions. Then they are adjusted for a specific business, depending on the negotiation of other factors to be taken into consideration.

State of the market
Like every other market, that for buying and selling a business goes up and down. It all depends on how many buyers and sellers there are at any particular time, the state of the general economy and confidence levels. One can pick an ideal time when one is ready to sell.

Premium for branding
A good brand can gain not only a premium but a substantial premium because a brand is expandable easily. Much effort should be spent on establishing a clear brand for your business and one that has more than limited market potential.

Premium for desirability
Various other factors can make your business more desirable to a buyer. For example, if a national network of employment agencies does not have an operation in your town, it will probably be cheaper to buy your business than to set up their own operation.

A buyer, whether an individual or a company, can have special skills that as soon as they buy your business they instantly improve its value. They have management skills. A marketing expert may see they can use their talents to grow the business. A computer expert may see an opportunity to make it more efficient and reduce operating costs. They both have a client list or a business that is synergized with yours.

Your negotiating skills
Like anything traded, negotiating skills will determine the final price. If you are not a good negotiator employ one. I suggest a well-chosen professional firm would probably increase the final selling price by more than their fee. Not to mention finding someone who you were not aware of.

Size of the enterprise
As firms grow the multiple they attract grows, mainly due to bigger buyers having bigger pockets and a more competitive market. There is a real incentive, therefore, to merge or acquire as you grow to raise the multiple. In practice, merging two businesses might not now be that easy, if they have different cultures. On the other hand, rationalizations in operating processes might allow some cuts and make them more profitable before increasing sales.

For most entrepreneurs their life wealth is their business and thus their pension scheme. Selling means that at least half of it can be put in the portfolio of investments meaning that your risk is greatly reduced.

I advocate paying interest for a bank loan or releasing equity only in extreme circumstances. They are the finance sources of last, not first resort. But that is another story for another time. Time stands for ‘Totally Inadequate Minutes Everyday’, and is the most vital resource in your business. Your eventual success is totally about how you spend your time; use it wisely and leverage it. Imagine you could freeze time, for everybody and everything else. Just you are able to work, while the world is kept in stasis. Wouldn’t that help?

‘What we love to do we find time to do. So focus on loving profit!’

An asset I have already defined as something that makes you money. I will now define what I call a ‘golden asset’ as something that makes money for you without your involvement.

An example of the former is something you sell to a customer personally. An example of the latter is someone or something that, while you were asleep, bought something from you. Ironically, as if to make the point, while I was writing this I received a paypal payment for a downloadable CD from my website.

So the question to ask is: ‘What golden assets can I acquire?’

Your answers may include: websites, ezines, anything with software, sales agents, affiliate deals, viral marketing.
Get out of employee mode where you are used to all income coming directly from the work you do. As an entrepreneur your role is to manipulate resources all around you in the most efficient, leveraged way to exploit a commercial opportunity.

I conducted much research on successful entrepreneurs. One of the factors that kept coming up is that they tend to be very good judges of people. Entrepreneurs don’t need to be talented, if they can spot it in others and then motivate and lead that talent.

Most famous entrepreneurs left school at 16 and I think being in the ‘real world’ developed their ‘people skills’ before those who did not join the world of work until after further or higher education. Interestingly those graduates often come to apply for jobs along with those who left school at 16, as the television program The Apprentice in North America and the UK has shown. Graduates, frankly, are not a rare resource.

Why study for a degree yourself when you can recruit graduates? You as entrepreneur exploit their talent while they, probably under parental advice, are seeking to secure a good job with a typical employee mindset. As a qualified teacher I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t invest in learning. I am suggesting that a lot of learning happens in and outside of academic institutions. Do both!

You can develop your business skills in a formal way, but don’t see your talent as a skill you sell for money. Develop your skills in managing and developing and turning assets around you into golden assets.