Speaking in Abbotsford, British Columbia

I’m up in Whistler, British Columbia tonight with entrepreneur Ross Brown and designer Dan Mansell. We’re going to do a bit of ziplining tomorrow here before heading back to Vancouver for some customer and partner meetings. Today I spoke at the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce in Abbotsford, BC outside of Vancouver. You can download the slides from the presentation “Ten Steps to Building a Company to $1 Million in Sales” here. If you’re in Vancouver and would like to meet up on Friday let me know.

Entrepreneur & Social Entrepreneur Meetup #9 Tomorrow 9pm

Entrepreneur & Social Entrepreneur Meetup #9 will be at our house in Chapel Hill on Thursday night October 18 at 9pm.

All area entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs and anyone working to change the world are invited. You can RSVP at http://unc.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7609970943 or just show up.

The following social ventures and companies have been at past meetups: Nourish International, Sustainability NC, The Great Awakening, Full Belly Project, Carolina Microfinance Initiative, Center for Global Initiatives, SPOT-NC, Advocates for Grassroots Development in Uganda, Hold

Giving Back As an Enlightened Entrepreneur - Book Excerpt

Below is an excerpt on Giving Back from the updated version of Zero to One Million, coming out in February through McGraw Hill…

Giving Back

I did an exercise when I was 20 years old that changed my life forever. I wrote down how I wanted to use my life to make a difference in the world—to help build stronger communities and societies here at home, and also work to end poverty and hunger globally. When I learned from reading an annual world health report from the World Health Organization that over 18,000,000 people die every year (49,365 per day) from preventable diseases and starvation the gravity of some of the most important issues of our day hit me.

When I learned from a World Bank report that as of 2001, 2.7 billion people lived on under $2 per day (42% of the humans in the world), the realization made me want to spend my life working entrepreneurially to address these issues. When I read The End of Poverty, by Columbia Economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2006, I further committed to being a leader of my generation to address the problems and ensuring that by the end of my life at least 95% of the wealth I create goes back to creating societies with greater access to opportunity and sustainably assisting people who have not had the opportunity I have been so fortunate to have.

As I added to my knowledge through travel, reading, and speaking with people who live in developing nations, I updated my mission statement and began to write what I call a Purpose Statement. Along the way, the added depth of purpose has given what I strive to do every day deep personal meaning. For me, entrepreneurship is not about making lots of money and living an extravagant life, it’s about being able to make a positive impact in the lives of thousands, and hopefully someday, billions. If you can find how starting and building a successful business can help you have a larger meaning in your life and allow you to give back to your community, you will be able to more easily find your core motivation and align what you do, with what you love.

Finding a deeper meaning and core motivation for doing what you do is a critically important part of getting through the difficult times along the way to becoming a successful businessperson. I have found this meaning for myself. As I wrote in the introduction to this book my Purpose Statement is:

I wish to spend my life working through entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, investing, philanthropy, public policy, and politics to end poverty in developing nations and at home, ensure environmental sustainability, help people understand that we are one humanity and that our commonalities are much greater than our differences, and help expand access to opportunity, healthcare, and education across the world for every human of every nation.

Right now, please take a moment to write down how you hope to use your talents, resources, and time on this planet to make a positive difference in the world. This can be a powerful exercise, so please take a couple minutes to complete it.

Action Item 11 – Finding Deeper Purpose in Your Life

Take a moment and write how you hope to use your business, time, energy, and resources to make a positive difference in the world. I wish to spend my life… ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________

Many extremely successful industrialists and entrepreneurs over the past 150 years have chosen to give back. Andrew Carnegie funded libraries all over the United States and created his foundation to ‘promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.’ Rockefeller created the Rockefeller foundation to ‘promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.’ Ford created the Ford Foundation to ‘promote democracy, reduce poverty, promote international understanding, and advance human achievement.’ Bill Gates has created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to ‘enhance global healthcare and reduce global poverty and expand access to educational opportunity and technology.’ Gates has said many times that he will give 95% of his wealth back to society before he dies. He considers himself a steward of wealth, as should any successful entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur, score is kept by who can create the most value. Money comes to you directly in proportion to how much value you create by rearranging the resources of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurial ability into the outputs that society desires. If we are successful, we can create millions, perhaps billions of dollars of value to society and in turn become wealth through stock appreciation, going public, or selling the company.

I hope you will give back as well what you can, along the way as you build your company—and especially after you have become wealthy. It is our job as enlightened entrepreneurs to give back to the society and world that has enabled us to succeed, to work to create fuller access to opportunity. Giving back can make our lives full of meaning and purpose, and make us more driven entrepreneurs at the same time.

I know if you set your mind to it you will become an extremely wealthy individual and make millions of dollars in your life. You may not see the way now, but if you commit to the goal and believe it, you will achieve it in time. It may take ten or twenty years, but if you choose to be, you will become a multi-millionaire. Knowing that you will become a multi-millionaire someday if you make the choice to be, I ask right now that you commit to contributing at least 90% of any wealth you make by the end of your life into a foundation or endowment of a charitable organization that can work to make our world a better place.

Action Item 12 – The Enlightened Entrepreneur’s Commitment

I, _______________ _________________ commit to contributing at least ninety percent of any wealth I earn during my lifetime into a personal foundation or endowments of charitable organizations that will work to address the major issues of our world such as poverty, hunger, education, healthcare, environmental sustainability and any other area that I believe will make the world, my nation, my state, and my community a better place. X __________________________________ Date: ____________

What is Your Vision?

What difference do you hope to make in the world during your lifetime? What drives you? Please share in the comments.

Quotes from Day 2 at Altitude

Another great day at Altitude. Here are the quotes from the day that Eben highlighted:

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” - Sun Tzu

“Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an opportunity.” - Benjamin Disraeli

“The essence of genious is to know what to overlook.” - William James

“It is better to be first than it is to be better.” - Al Ries and Jack Trout

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I watch what they do.” - Andrew Carnegie

“Data is most valuable at the point of origin. The value of data is directly related to its timeliness.” - Lawrence Miller

“When you have mastered the numbers you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.” - Harold Greene

I actually got more work done today than I do in a normal day in the office with 88 emails sent and a number of key projects worked on.

Quotes from Today at Altitude

Eben Pagan has used some powerful quotes today to begin each Altitude session. They were:

“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon the renunciation of instinct.” - Sigmund Freud

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” - Peter Drucker

“I will pay more for the ability to deal with people than any other ability under the sun.” - John D. Rockefeller

“Never contract a friendship with a man who is not better than thyself.” - Confucius

“I work with people I like, admire, and trust.” - Warren Buffett

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process you don’t know what you’re doing.” - W. Edward Deming

“Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company.” - Bill Gates

At Get Altitude Conference in LA This Week

I am at Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude Conference this week in Los Angeles recommended to me by my friend Cameron Johnson a couple months ago. The majority of the attendees are CEOs and entrepreneurs who run companies between $1 million and $10 million in annual sales. The program is broken up into the sections of You, Your Market, Your Marketing, Your People, and Your Systems. I will be blogging from the event during the event and letting you know what I think about it. I have three pages of action items from the Day 1 content so far, so it’s off to a good start.

I’ve run into Carlos Garcia from Traffic Tactics and Jesse Lear from Young Wealth Weekly.

Eben runs a 85 person $25 million per year company called Double Your Dating, which is the category leader in the dating advice space, which ensures humorous anecdotes constantly flow through the advice. One panelist just quipped:

“Speaking of getting off, these chairs are really interesting for the bum.”

Impact 2007 Conference on Social Entrepreneurship.

Tonight I attended a reception at Sullivan’s in Raleigh for tomorrow’s Impact 2007 conference on social entrepreneurship. The conference began in 2005 at MIT, moved to Stanford last year, and is being hosted by NC State this year and sponsored by the College of Management’s Entrepreneuship Education Initiative (EEI), Stanford’s BASES Social Competition, and MIT’s IDEAS Competition.

I met some fascinating people tonight including D.C. Jayasundera, a masters student from Sri Lanka currently attending Stanford studying water sanitation and engineering, Kyle Greer, a board member of the EEI and commercial real estate broker with Carolantic Realty, Mark Saad, a student at State who works in corporate sales at Rush Hour, a indoor high-speed go-kart racing facility in Garner, and Linda Planto, Associate Director of The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center, a state-funded facility that works with researchers and technologists to help bring innovations to market in Mass. She and I had a interesting conversation about photovoltaic cells, coaxial cable-like solar reception devices (that enable the photons and electrons to move in the proper direction to maximize solar power efficiency), and the expected state of fusion power in 30 years. Some very smart people. I am glad such a conference is here in NC. I’m looking forward to attending tomorrow!

Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour in Canton, OH

I’m in Canton, Ohio today speaking at Stark State College with the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour and my good friends Michael Simmons, Sheena Lindahl, and Jason Dalrymple. Michael and Sheena are doing a great job right now on their presentation on how to indentify and pursue your passion in life. While I’m only speaking at one college with them this semester, they are going to about 15 schools in a big RV (wait till you see photos of their branded RV later today!). Good luck to them on their tour! I’ll be putting up the video of the speech in a few days.

Speaking at Appalachian State Yesterday

I had a chance to head over to Boone, NC yesterday to speak to students at Appalachian State University. I gave a presentation on “Ten Steps to Building a Company to $1 Million in Sales.” You can download a copy of slides from the event here.

Thanks to Bryan and Zola for bringing me over and for everyone that helped with the event!