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Rule Number 4: Take More Risks
There’s a saying that the more exciting the life, the more risks there are in it. I know for sure that sticking with what we don’t really want, or never going for what we really might, in the name of ‘security’ or ‘safety,’ may not be a good enough answer for us.
I’m not advocating recklessness of course, but I’m suggesting that being too frightened to give up some security is deadly, and one of the key inhibitors of success.
I want to embolden you through meeting four brilliant individuals who have taken risks, failed, picked themselves up and used failure to their advantage, emerging with resilience and massive lessons to benefit their next venture.
This is particularly evident with Nick Jones and Iqbal Wahhab. It’s no coincidence that they are both in the restaurant business, one of the riskiest and most failure-prone markets to be in.
Let’s go!
It’s easier to take risks when you’re cushioned by the support of a comfortable family background providing a financial safety net. But what if that’s missing and your family actually advise against taking a risk to stay on a safer, more predictable route? This was precisely the case with my next case study, Alexander Amosu.
When I mentioned to my 14 year-old son, Jamie, that I was meeting Alexander, he begged me to let him come with me, pleading that he could learn so much more from Alexander than at school. Jamie went to school but as I listened to Alexander talk, I wished that he could have been there to hear his story.
Alexander is a hero to 14 year-olds because he is a mobile-phone ringtone millionaire. He is Britain’s most successful seller of mobile-phone tones. Labelled The Lord of The Ringtones, by the media, Alexander’s turnover was £1.2 million in his first year and in 2002 he was Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Institute of Directors Black Enterprise Awards. In 2003 he sold 80% of R&B Ringtones for an undisclosed figure.
Born in London, to Nigerian parents, Alexander spent the first few years of his life in the capital, moving back to Nigeria when he was two. At 12, he returned to London to live with his grandmother and younger brother in Wood Green, north London.
There was so little room in their council house that Alexander had to sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. It was in 2000, at 24, that he accidentally stumbled on his lucrative career, though his rags-to-riches story begins much earlier.
Alexander Amosu
‘It all started when I was in school. When I came back to England from Nigeria it was a real culture shock because I couldn’t fit into any of the groups at school. I was different and I couldn’t understand that. I wanted to be in with the cool kids who had the Nike trainers but actually I didn’t even have enough money for school dinners. I had really geeky and ugly clothes. So at the age of 13, I started doing a paper round, getting up 6.30am, and delivering newspapers everyday for £10 a week.
In fact at first I considered stealing money to buy things to help me fit in with the other kids, but I didn’t really believe that that was my strength; I was too scared! But it was easy for me to wake up early, deliver the papers, save my £10 for five weeks and then eventually buy my Nike trainers. I put them on, showed them to my grandmother, who was proud of what I’d achieved, went to school and got a fantastic response from my peer group.
I was always, always looking for ways to make money.When I was 16 and resitting my GCSEs I put on a football tournament. I got the school’s pitch for free, charged each player £5 to enter and bought a medallion for £3.50 and a trophy for £10 for the winner. I made a £750 profit. I put on six more tournaments in other sports and branched out to put on parties and inter-college balls, like a Valentine’s Ball.
While I was at university, I ran a cleaning company that I eventually sold on for just under £19,000. I was at North London University studying computer-aided engineering and I knew I needed to earn money to live on.
One day, in my first year, my aunt who was heavily pregnant asked me to clean her house. So I cleaned the house, and when she gave me £20 as I left, I thought about the number of other people who must be in a similar position. I decided to take a chance on setting up my own company.
I called it the Care Cleaning Agency and the first thing I did was design an advertising flyer on my home PC. designed a flyer on my home PC. I printed off 5,000 leaflets and personally went round putting them through letterboxes in my local area.
A week later, I had my first interview with a potential customer. It was like my first adult interaction with the world and I wasn’t prepared for it.
As soon as I got into her house, I could tell that I wouldn’t get the job because I was a kid. I didn’t look professional and I didn’t have a licence or insurance. So I left that meeting thinking that I’d learned something. When I got another call, I bought a suit, photocopied my passport and birth certificate and mentioned my Mum as a reference. I offered to clean the woman’s house free of charge for a week and sure enough she employed me.
My belief is with that every no, there’s always a yes. If someone says no to you, that’s a problem and you have to find a solution. You’ve got to find the reason for that ‘no’ and counterbalance it with something else.
By the time I sold the company, three years after I worked for that first client, I had 21 cleaning contracts and was employing staff via the Job Centre, paying them £5 an hour and keeping £5 for myself. The business grew through being listed in the Yellow Pages and advertising in a local newspaper and we were taking about £1,500 a month.
It was the most difficult thing that I’ve ever done because it’s a very complex and intimate thing when you enter people’s homes. There were a lot of problems if the house wasn’t cleaned properly or if something got damaged. I found it hard to manage but I just learned from every mistake that I made.
There have been moments in my life when I’ve had to really believe in myself and be passionate about what I was doing to justify a big risk. When I was in my final year of university, I came up with the idea for the R&B ring tone website.
I only had about four or five months left of my engineering course at University, but I told my Dad that I was going to leave because I believed so strongly in this idea. He just couldn’t understand why I’d wasted three years to go and play with mobile phones. I respect my parents and it was very sad to go against their wishes but I really believed that that was the best thing for me at the time.
My Dad just couldn’t see how I could be successful. Coming from a Nigerian background, there is a pressure to have a significant degree and become a doctor or lawyer.
My big idea came when I sent my brother a ringtone I had made. It was ‘Big Pimpin’ by Jay-Z. My brother’s phone went off at college and immediately all his friends wanted it.
At the time, 2000, most people only had the ringtone that came with their phone. So I invited them all over and charged them £1 for the ringtone. In the first day I made £7. I thought, “What would happen if I made a catalogue of ringtones and advertised it?”
My brain went into work mode. I did some research and found only one company in the UK and several in Germany providing ringtones.
I decided to specialise in R&B music and, within six weeks, came up with another six ringtones. I installed an extra phone line, with a premium-rate number charging £1.50 a minute in the council house I was living in with my parents (they had moved to London from Nigeria a few years before). I advertised the number on the back of 20,000 fliers that I had made for my next party.
On the first day R&B Ringtones made £97. I gave up university. Four months later I moved the business out of my parents’ house into two offices in Islington and had 21 people working for me selling 1000 ringtones. We were making the songs all day long as they were coming out. It took off like a rocket. Within a year we had a £1 million turnover.
I believe in education but I don’t think it’s the only tool in life. I don’t think we teach our children how to make money off their own backs so that they’re not reliant on getting a job to survive. I’ve been doing a lot of talks in schools and communities, but when I have more time, I will eventually open up a school where children can learn how to make money work for them and not the other way round.
I never fully believed that I would make millions but I always tried to get money for that moment and use it to invest in whatever I saw around me that had potential. Lots of things I’ve tried to do have failed. I spent £1,000 buying old tin cans and lamps to sell on at car-boot sales, I only sold half my stock and ended up making a loss. I like failing though because I really believe it makes me stronger and I see it as a learning curve.
I’ve never blamed my failures on the colour of my skin and I believe people who say that are holding themselves back. I’ve learned a lot from being in business and now I only seem to deal with white people. In this environment you have to be able to adapt to people and not think that everyone you’re dealing with is racist because it just won’t work. I make sure that I get what I want regardless of what people think of me.
Three years after starting up R&B Ringtones I sold 80 per cent of the business to give me the cash to set up mobsvideo.com, which provides 30-second clips for mobile phones and soon I want to be able to expand it to entire programmes and films. I know I’ll succeed again. I tell everyone, motivation plus determination equals success. If you have that no one can stop you. If I can do it, you can do it.’
The crucial thing I wish Jamie had been able to learn from a meeting with Alexander was how simple, straightforward and fearless his attitude and approach is.
This brilliant combination has led to amazing success. He makes things happen by just having a go and giving it his best shot: not everything has always worked out, but that’s fine, and something to be learnt from. When he set up the cleaning company, there was nothing complicated about it. He simply printed off the fliers and walked the streets near his home, putting them through letterboxes. Couldn’t have been simpler. There was no weighing up the pros and cons or working out a business plan. If it worked, it worked. When his first potential customer declined, he figured out why, wore a suit to meet the next one, and got the job.
Alexander emphasised to me his total amazement at how simple it is to take a great idea and run with it and how many great ideas there are lying around, waiting for someone to take a risk with them.
He admits he knew nothing about the real technical side of producing ringtones, but that didn’t stop him from making it happen, and he was shocked that no one had already done it. Nor did he invent the technology that will make mobsvideo.com a success, but so what? ‘I know nothing about building a house,’ he said. ‘But I guarantee that if I wanted to build one, then I’d do the research and I’d know what there was to know. I find out what needs to be done.’
Talking to Alexander made me think of something Philip Beresford once said. Philip is the compiler of The Sunday Times Rich List. He said that the difference between the rich and everyone else is simply this, ‘We can all talk up a good idea in the pub, but 99.9 per cent of the population never does anything about it. A money-maker will get up the next morning and, even with a massive hangover, have the confidence to turn that idea into a money spinner.’
I don’t know about the hangover as Alexander prefers squash to champagne, but he’s definitely one of the .1 per cent who’d be up the next morning making calls to check out that good idea.
The Fear of Failure
On February 24th 2003 during the deadest month of the year for the French catering world, a day when only ten people ate lunch in his Michelin three-star restaurant, the Cote d’Or in Saulieu, rural Burgundy, Bernard Loiseau, one of the most successful chefs of his generation, put a gun to his head, killing himself instantly.
Why? In 1991 he had been given the ultimate accolade for a chef - his third Michelin star. But that which blessed the young chef also cursed him. Bernard dreaded failure as much as he had craved success. The need to hold on to those three stars tormented him. His nightmare was to lose his fame, his business and – above all – his stars.
The tragedy of Bernard was not that he was about to lose his three stars, (he wasn’t) and his reputation was not in danger, but so dependent was he on that external validation of his standing that it drove him to pull the trigger.
Albert Einstein said that ‘Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’ It was Bernard Loiseau’s unthinking respect for the authority of the Michelin judges and restaurant critics that proved his greatest enemy. It was no accident that he shot himself on the eve of the 2003 Michelin guide’s appearance.
This is an extract from Chapter 4 of Fiona harrold's new book, "The 7 Rules Of Success" available in the shops now or from us here.
