ALL IN: 101 Real Life Business Lessons For Emerging Entrepreneurs

By Bill Green

You have the Big Idea, the drive and ambition.

You see the market, and you’ve identified the customers. You want to be wildly successful. You wonder, how certain entrepreneurs have achieved success without a fancy education or unlimited access to capital. Enter Bill Green, a serial entrepreneur. Using his own impress

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eagle Creek Media Group LLC
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781633934658

Bill Green

Bill Green is a graphic designer and the poster artist for Lebowski Fest.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

I BELIEVE IN YOUR BIG DREAMS

Life is too short to be little.

—Benjamin Disraeli

I KNOW PEOPLE like you. You’ve got that look in your eye. It’s a look of fierce determination. While all your friends are out having brunch, playing Pokémon GO, or doing yoga in their spare time, here you are reading a business book—and not just any book. You’re reading my book because you’ve got dreams. Big ones. You’re not just sitting around waiting for life to happen. You want to make things happen.

You’re going somewhere.

I bet you already might own a profitable small business. That’s awesome. Good for you; you’re doing what you love. Maybe a lot of your friends already think you’ve made it—and why not? You’re living the American Dream. You’re a successful entrepreneur with a nice house and a happy spouse—what else could you possibly want out of life?

Maybe you even have a business partner who says, We’ve got a good thing going, why are you buying books about how to grow our business? Why rock the boat when the boat’s sailing smoothly? But something inside of you wants to rock it, right? You know deep down that your business could be so much more so you’re reading my book because you’re asking yourself, how can I get to the next level?

Am I in the ballpark?

I told you I know people like you. There’s no shame in being ambitious. That is the essence of the real American Dream. Where would we be without our big dreams? I don’t know about anyone else in your life, but let me tell you, I believe in yours.

Who the heck am I, anyway? At my core, I’m just a scrappy kid who started his career bootstrapping a startup in the days before the word startup even existed. I built my first business from the ground up, out of one table at a flea market that eventually sold for $1.6 billion dollars.

I didn’t get all that money myself! I only got a small fraction of it; somehow, I didn’t get the memo to stick around for twelve more years. But talk about starting small.

If I can do it; I know you can too.

I WAS ONCE YOU

I will admit, I’m a sentimental guy. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs the way I did, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. I certainly never went on any fancy vacations or attended any highbrow boarding schools. In fact, I never even graduated from college. Heck, I barely graduated from high school!

I was too busy building a business as a teenager to bother too much with homework or science projects. I’m what you call an old-school self-made man. No one gave me anything in life; I got my education in the real world where grades really counted—and boy, am I glad I did, because the insights I gained while just doing it have lasted me a lifetime.

My humble background is why I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for feisty entrepreneurs like you. Forty years ago, I was you. I was a small business owner who had a great idea for a business that I brought to life, and it was chugging along pretty well. I shouldn’t have had any complaints. I was living the dream. But you know what? I had that same itch you do.

I didn’t want to settle for good; I wanted great. Not just great, I wanted amazing. I didn’t want to beat my competition. I wanted to own them.

Maybe you haven’t been given anything. Maybe you didn’t draw the luckiest lot in life. Neither did I. What’s behind you is not important. No one will remember where you started. They’ll only remember where you finish. Your dreams may seem like a fantasy to most people now, but if you combine a great idea with a lot of persistent and consistent hard work, you can get anything you want out of life.

Just look at me. I did it and along the way I learned 101 essential insights into making your business great that can be applied to virtually any business model on earth. These are the lessons I’m going to share with you. I didn’t just wake up one day and have all these epiphanies. All these things I learned from experience. I had to make mistakes, I had to try again, I had to keep coming back day after day until I got it right.

I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.

This book is a hybrid. I’m going to tell you my own story, not to gratify my ego, but because there are a lot of things I went through that might be useful for you to learn from.

In addition, I’m distilling some of the key learning experiences into those 101 essential insights I mentioned a moment earlier.

I hope you draw inspiration from my story, and I hope you take to heart the lessons I share.

If you’ve got the same drive I do, and I know you do, I want to show you how to conceive, build, and grow your business from a neophyte startup into a market-dominating company that provides amazing service, employs talented and motivated people, and attracts customers who don’t just like you—they love you. They need you. They can’t live without you.

Sound like fun? Sure it does!

A GREAT IDEA IS A POWERFUL WEAPON

Maybe you already had a business that failed. Hey, that’s okay: you had to start somewhere. It may sound counterintuitive, but failing at something is an essential part of success. I bet you already have a great idea for a product or a business in your back pocket and don’t know what to do with it. It feels good to own that idea, doesn’t it?

A great idea is like gold in your hands. Nothing amazing ever happened from having a bad idea or no ideas at all. But a man or woman armed with a great idea? Forget about it. It’s a powerful weapon.

I know you may not feel all that powerful right now. Some days it seems like it’s you against the world, right? Do some people’s eyes glaze over when you pitch them your concept at a dinner party or when you’re at your kid’s soccer game? I hate it when that happens. But it does, even to the best of us. Forget those guys. Stay focused. Don’t let anyone tell you that your dreams are irrelevant. They’ll be the first to brag that they knew you way back when once you do make it.

Know this: it doesn’t cost anything not to believe in something. It costs everything to believe in an idea so much that you’re willing to spend your life doing it and doing it until it becomes a reality. That’s guts. That’s passion. That’s the resolve you need to succeed. If anyone tells you a little guy with a great idea can’t make it in this economy—that only rich guys or tech kids from Silicon Valley can get their ideas funded—just let it roll off your shoulders. Those naysayers don’t have your vision.

They don’t have your unbending intent.

WHY LISTEN TO A GUY LIKE ME?

I certainly didn’t let anyone stop me from achieving my dream. I started working flea markets with one of my buddies when I was seventeen. Then my buddy dropped out and it was just me, until one day when a lucky kind of disaster struck at home.

My dad, Marty, lost his job after twenty-eight years.

Overnight, I had become the only breadwinner in the family. My dad saw what I was doing and said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll help you at the flea markets while I look for work.

Suddenly, I had a partner again.

Dad and I worked the flea markets around Philadelphia and New Jersey six days a week and turned selling hardware and plumbing supplies into a profitable flea-market business. A year later, we turned that into a hardware store, all before I was out of high school.

Once we had the hardware store up and running, my dad was back to making the same salary he had at his old job. He was happy again. He’d see me plotting world domination, and he’d say, Billy, why rock the boat? We’re comfortable.

Sound familiar? I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t want to end up like Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, working at my dad’s hardware store all my life, even though I was the co-owner of the business. Just the thought of it drove me nuts, so I was motivated to think long and hard about getting bigger. Dad (love him to death) didn’t have the vision I had. He had dropped out of high school when he was sixteen. My mom, who was now part of the family business, felt as Dad did. She had been supposed to go to the Juilliard School of Music, but her father wouldn’t let her because girls were supposed to get married and have babies.

Those were the times we lived in.

So there I was, alone with my ambition. I spent many nights thinking about how I could expand our business into something more. Then one day, Dad and I came up with an idea: why didn’t we offer credit accounts to commercial clients like apartment buildings? We knew of hardware stores back in Brooklyn who were doing it. Why not us? That’s got a bigger upside, right? So we created a specialized niche market in our area by distributing to customers on commercial credit accounts. With that one move, we went from a small neighborhood hardware store to a wholesale distribution business called Wilmar (short for William and Martin), and we were off to the races.

Fast-forward to almost twenty years later. I had bought Dad out of the business long ago, and he and Mom were retired and living more comfortably than they ever could have imagined. I won the 1996 Delaware Valley Entrepreneur of the Year award, sponsored by Ernst and Young, NASDAQ, and USA Today.

Later that year, Wilmar went public (NASDAQ: WLMR).

Forbes magazine rated Wilmar as one of the Best IPOs of 1996, and in 1999 Forbes named it one of the 200 Best Small Companies in America. It was a pretty good time in my life. Most people in my shoes would have been content.

I wasn’t.

After the IPO, the business was thriving, but I kept thinking bigger. I looked at how fragmented the industrial distribution marketplace was, and I thought, all these companies we’re competing against really should be under one umbrella . . . we’d operate better as a whole, be more profitable, and provide a better client experience. I didn’t wait for some other company to get the same idea. I didn’t wait to be acquired. I started acquiring our competitors one by one. We acquired and integrated over fifteen companies from 1996 to 2001, and got so big that we changed our corporate name from Wilmar Industries to Interline Brands.

In some cases, we left the existing core brand names of the companies we acquired in place for all sales and marketing functions. Interline was the umbrella corporation that never touched customers, so they never had to change who they did business with. I sound like a pretty smart guy in this instance, right? Let me tell you, I had to make a mistake to learn this lesson too. We tried to integrate our first acquisition without keeping their brand in front of their existing customers, and it was a mess. This is how you learn: by making mistakes.

For twenty-five years, I kept learning, adjusting, building, and acquiring, and you know what? It turned out pretty well. I led Wilmar-Interline from a small retail outlet to an industry-leading $630 million distribution business with 2,300 employees and 60 distribution centers across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. As CEO, I personally managed the company’s banking and institutional shareholder relationships. I’ve always had a talent for sales and marketing, so I also kept a hands-on role in the day-to-day operations of the company. I was a pioneer in the catalogue market as well as using technology to improve our processes. I integrated the latest tech into our distribution and customer service operations way before the Internet ever existed. And man, did it work. It’s still working today. Interline Brands has revenues of over $1.8 billion and is owned by The Home Depot.

That’s a lot of hardware.

BUT THAT’S NOT THE END OF THE STORY

For a lot of people, this would have been enough, right? After I sold my stake in Interline, I had enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life. I tried to retire for a couple of months, but that’s not who I am.

I still had that itch.

I was only forty-three and couldn’t imagine sitting around playing golf all day for the rest of my life, so I started thinking about what I could do next.

Something different. Something big.

I didn’t want to be known just as an industrial distribution expert, so I thought about how I could expand my skills into other areas and got interested in private equity. I founded WSG Partners, LLC (now known as Crestar Partners), a boutique co-investment private equity firm where I shared my knowledge and experience with all types of business entrepreneurs who were looking for partners. I invested in some pretty cool companies in a wide array of markets (like fitness clubs, a coffee company, a cigar company, a vendor management company, a specialty liquor line, and even a safety and homeland defense supply company).

From 2003 to 2008, WSG Partners made equity investments in nine privately held businesses. I participated with other private equity firms that did management-led buyouts, recapitalizations, strategic minority equity investments, and growth capital financing. I wasn’t just an equity partner; I was an active investment participant who got involved when they needed me, way beyond the board-of-directors level. I enjoyed mentoring CEOs and even challenged them when necessary. I wasn’t afraid to go all in when I believed in something.

Then, in 2008, I switched gears again. I wanted to expand my game even further, so I created Crestar Capital, and got into the tax lien business. We acquired more than 45,000 liens in excess of $300 million in lien value and more than $2 billion in asset value. I parlayed that experience in 2012 to create Crestar Homes, which acquires, renovates, sells, and leases previously owned homes. To date, Crestar has owned and managed more than 430 properties.

But I wasn’t finished yet. I kept building off the new knowledge and skills I’d acquired. I never stayed still; I kept evolving and expanding my reach. I was frustrated with the process of financing my own real estate, so I thought, Why don’t I capitalize on my underwriting and finance experience and get into real estate finance? So I founded the company LendingOne in 2014, a fintech (financial technology) company that provides one-year loans for fix-and-flip projects and long-term rental loans to nonowner-occupied real estate investment projects. My newest creation is going great. I’m confident it’s going to be a $1 billion a year originator. It’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take to get there.

Would you bet against me?

I wouldn’t bet against you either.

COLLEGE CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

As you can see, I’ve done a lot of different things in my life. You name it, I’ve either done it or spent time thinking about how I could get involved. I’ve had success in a lot of different industries and even a few failures. So I’m not some know-it-all with a silver-bullet business solution that’s going to turn your goose gold and send you to the top of the NASDAQ overnight. Newsflash: that guy with the silver bullet doesn’t exist. I’m not that smart. I’m just a curious, determined person who knows how to adapt to the changing times and compensate for my shortcomings. I learned all I know on the street, talking to clients, knocking on doors, and pounding the pavement. You don’t need an MBA to do what I do.

You may think I’m advocating against going to college, but I don’t want to give you that impression. I’m not going to tell you college is worthless, because I believe you should have an education. But these days, if you look around, you’ll see there is a college debt epidemic in the United States. I see kids (or their parents) spending a hundred grand or two hundred grand on a college education. Do you know how long you’re going to have to work to pay all that off? Put a pencil to paper, and it might give you pause.

To make matters worse, a lot of these kids get out of college with a fancy degree from an elite school and guess what? They can’t find a good job. Some can’t even find a job in their field of study. Why? Because the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world have already snatched them up! For all the kids who go to college, there is a whole generation of people who got in at the ground level of a company and worked their way up. And don’t forget the people who already came up with their great ideas and busted their butts to implement them while all the college kids were theorizing over widgets in class. This has left a whole lot of educated young adults scratching their heads. Not only are they behind their competition in work experience—they’re also saddled with all this debt.

I hear from a lot of young people who are second-guessing their decision to go to school. They ask me for advice and I say, If you’re struggling with whether it’s worth it to spend all that money on a piece of paper or put that money into your own business, I can’t tell you what the right answer is for you. I’ve seen successful people come from both worlds. If you want to start a robotics company or become a rocket scientist—you probably need to go to college! But if you’re a young aspiring entrepreneur reading this book, you probably want to be a small business owner in a field that doesn’t take years to understand. Now, this is where I can give you some advice based on my short-lived college experience.

The year was 1977. The hardware store business was going pretty well, but I still wanted to give college a shot. My dad didn’t understand. He said, Go ahead, but he didn’t care either way. Back in those days, I was probably the only salesman who told their customers, Don’t call me before noon, because I’m getting an education. So I’d show up for my classes in a suit. That was considered weird back then (I’m sure it still is), but I had to wear one because I went to work after school. So one day I was in my Introduction to Business Management class, and the management teacher stopped me and said, You come to school in a suit?

I explained, I have a business with my dad. After class, I leave school to go sell to clients.

My teacher asked me, Would you mind speaking to my sales class?

I said, Sure.

Then I asked the teacher what he did prior to becoming a professor, and he said he owned a store on the Ocean City boardwalk in New Jersey. I knew those stores: they were about half the size of a closet! That was small potatoes stuff. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I spoke to his sales class anyway.

A few days later, I had an epiphany while I was talking to his class. I looked at all the kids out there listening to me speak who all had dreams of making it big. Then I looked at the teacher and thought, Wait a minute. How could this guy who sold trinkets on the Ocean City boardwalk teach me anything about business management? I wanted to be way bigger than having a little store on the boardwalk. Heck, the business I was already running was way bigger than the biggest store this guy ever managed. And that’s when it all started to come together. I said to myself, I’m working my butt off all the time so I can pay for these classes, which take a little more than nothing to pass. Why do I need school? I’m wasting my time.

So I quit college. Do I have any regrets? That’s a tough one. How could I have any regrets with my business career? That turned out great, but I will say deep down that not getting a college education was a life experience that I sorely miss. I wish I had done it, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

STILL, I HAD A THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE

Instead, I sought my education elsewhere. I studied on my own. I read books. I found mentors who could teach me the things I needed to know. I remained inherently curious about how things worked, so I asked questions. Lots of them. I developed a personal thirst for knowledge to compensate for my lack of formal education. I kind of had a chip on my shoulder about it; I wanted to prove to the world that you didn’t need an MBA to make it. And it worked for me.

When I got Wilmar going strong, I wanted to pass down my drive for self-improvement to my employees. I wanted to instill in all my sales force the same edge to achieve that I had. So I offered continuing education courses way before it was the norm for companies my size. I wasn’t able to pay for all my employees to go to college, but I did what I could. I had guys from Dale Carnegie come in and speak to our sales team on Saturdays. They were masterful at teaching my sales force Salesmanship 101.

We also created the Wilmar Internal Library. It was set up in a giant display case in our lunchroom and was full of self-improvement tapes that we encouraged our employees to check out. We had every kind of sales and self-improvement tape imaginable—from Stephen Covey to Ken Blanchard. We had some really cool stuff.

I would tell my sales team: Look, guys, you don’t have to be a born salesperson to be great. If you’re in your car for eight hours a day, and many of you are, I highly encourage you to listen to these self-improvement tapes and hone your game. You didn’t go to Harvard. So what? Think of this as your ‘rolling university.’ There’s so much training for salespeople out there if you want it. But you have to want it.

I didn’t stop there. When I happened to be riding in one of my salespeople’s cars, I would get on their case if they were listening to sports radio. I’d say, C’mon, you’re wasting your time. Why not work on improving your fastball instead of listening to a bunch of millionaires improve theirs? Don’t you want to be a millionaire too?

It didn’t take long for my salespeople to turn off WIP Sports Radio whenever I got in their cars! They knew what I was up to when I asked them for a ride to the next customer meeting. But I know it worked with a lot of guys too. A lot of my salespeople thanked me for giving them those subtle kicks in the rear, because it motivated them.

A LIFETIME OF BUSINESS EXPERIENCE IN ONE BOOK

I want to give you the knowledge you need to succeed as well as that extra push to take your game to the next level. I want to be your paperback mentor, because I think you’ve got what it takes. You’re going to need a lot of people like me giving you advice if you’re going to make it, trust me. You’ll have to take your lumps like the rest of us, but hopefully you’ll learn how to avoid some of the most common business mistakes by learning how a guy like me navigated my way through it.

I can’t guarantee you a 100 percent success rate. A lot of things will have to fall right