How to Blow a Million Dollars: An Ex-Entrepreneur's Tale of What Not to Do

By Keven Ashley Gambold and Abigail Jennifer Gambold

Ever get tired of reading about how easy it is to make a bazillion dollars by becoming an entrepreneur?

Me too. This book dishes up all the dirt on the savage reality of the struggle.

A survival guide for any start-up entering the small business gladiatorial arena.

Arm

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keven Ashley Gambold
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780999339800

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HOW TO BLOW A MILLION DOLLARS

An Ex-Entrepreneur’s Tale of What Not to Do

Keven Gambold

¶

PRONOUN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

Pearls Before Swine

Wheel Right

Now Look What You Did…

Scar Tissue

Who The $%@# Are You to Talk?

Our Merry Band

End of the Beginning

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

Take Off Top Tips

Lies, Damned Lies and Your Competitors

True story

Humble but Weak?

SEP 1. The Buck Stops Over There.

SEP 2. I’m on the First Page.

SEP 3. Well, I’m Certified.

SEP 4. If You Can’t Beat Them.

Lessons Identified?

CHIEF EXECUTIVE JANITOR

The Idle Tuesday Test

What’s in a Name?

Shaped Pegs & Odd Holes

There’s an App for That

Leading Vs Doing Vs Managing

Culture Shock

It’s good to talk?

Lessons Identified?

RULE OF TENS & THE DEAD ENDS

Build It and They’ll…er… Hello?

Business Plans and Other Works of Fiction

Rule of Threes and How I Miss It

Filing in the Round File

Another True Story

The NDA Test

To Focus or not to, er… What was I saying?

Push a Rope

The Bleeding Edge

The Chasm

Lessons Identified?

ETHICS & SHENANIGANS

It’s Just Business?

A Nice Grey Shade, that

Officers & Gentlemen Cads

And yet another True Story

Gut Check

WWWD?

Go-giver

A Good Deal

Pay Yourself First

Just sound good on the radio

Lessons Identified?

BOARD GAMES & THE ‘I’ WORD

Liability Anyone?

Burn Rates, Runways & Stopways

Investing 001

Pitch Black

The Pitch Deck

What’s in a Valuation?

How much for How much?

D & O & BOD

Please Sir, May I Have Another?

Lessons Identified?

CHARACTERS & CHARLATANS

More Sayings

Character A. The Lunchtime Legend

Character B. The Laurel Rester

Aside: Character A1. The Drop-In Flipper.

Character C. The Funding-dependent Bipolar

Character D. The Stop-Starter

Character E. The Bare-faced Sponge

Yet Another True Story

Character F. The Too Honest, It Hurts

Character G. The Intern

Character H. The Eternal Optimist

Lessons Identified?

THE THOUSAND DUCKS

Life Lessons Applied to the Death of a Business

The Ties that Bind

Eye off the Ball

That Creeping Feeling

When One Door Closes… Fetch a Fire Axe?

Abandon Ship, Rats first

They Took the Light Switch?

Lessons Identified?

COPING MECHANISMS

Once More unto the Breach…

UI Schmoo-I

Another Bloody Start-up

Back to School

Write a Book

Don’t Let the Barstewards Get You Down

Lessons Identified?

UPSIDE DOWN, NOTHING ON THE CLOCK

Russian Roulette

The Brain-Assault

The Marie Celeste

The Own Goal

Follow on Foul

No Shirt, No Sale, No Service

A Fiery Shade of Grey

Lessons Identified?

COLLOQUIALISMS

POST SCRIPT

HOMEWORK

The End of The Book

More by Keven Gambold

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2017 Keven Gambold. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, teleported or cloned by any current method or any future technique that our robot overlords may invent, without the author’s express permission. Even if the robots demand it forcefully.

Of course, short quotes in attributable reviews, especially favorable ones, are welcomed. If you would send the author the links to these out of courtesy, he herein thanks you in advance.

We even have ISBNs, do you?

ISBN: 978-0-9993398-0-0 (E-book)

ISBN: 978-0-9993398-1-7 (Paperback)

DEDICATION

To my incredible kids, Abi, Ben and Eva

Let’s hope this builds back your college funds, otherwise you’re going to have to learn to play a sport.

Love Dad xXxx

To my long-suffering parents, Bill and Jenny, and to my kind brother Iain

Your patience with my shenanigans, your advice, and your help to dig me out of various holes are forever uppermost in my mind. My debts to you are immense. Thank you.

To my good lady wife, Cat

Thank you for letting me screw up. It’s very cathartic!

AUDIOBOOK

To thank you for the leap of faith you just took in buying this book, I will let you subject yourself to 4 hours of the author talking at you…

…For FREE.

Just fill in the Contact Us form with the message ‘Free Audiobook’ at:

https://www.universalexperts.co/

and I’ll email you the easy download link to help you get the solid 8 hours sleep you deserve as early as tonight!

LIST OF TABLES

Of Contents

Coffee

Dining Room

Breakfast bar (not strictly a table)

Console

Poseur (really?)

Farmhouse

Corner

Tennis (that’s funny, right there)

This isn’t the sort of book that has real tables. If you bought it under that premise, then I apologize. Next time, maybe just flick through it more thoroughly?

PROLOGUE

EVERYONE HAS A BOOK IN them the saying (apparently) goes, and I’ve used this as an excuse for carrying about 5 lbs. of excess body weight for the past 20 years. I’ll get it out when the time is right.

After half a lifetime of drunken shenanigans in various air forces, I had plenty of stories, few of which would be suitable for my kids to read, and some which might lead to legal issues, psych evaluations or worse: social media exile. The full saying, Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases, that’s where it should stay, would apply in this case.

But then my first post-military dabble in the world of business turned into a charade of poor choices, bad judgement, ill intents, and mismanagement. A few of the more naïve members of our team used to say, as yet another absurd event ensued, This will be a great chapter in ‘The Book’ when we make it out the other side. We did not make it out and thus ‘The Book’ would remain unwritten. Unless…

After the obligatory hand-wringing, blubbing, and boning up on ‘Bankruptcy 101’, I flew out for a walloping from one of our ex-investors. On the soul-sucking return trip, the good idea fairies started their dance again.

Those airport corridor stores are a cornucopia of success strategy books and entrepreneurial wonder-boy/girl magazines. Each one has a grinning billionaire wanting to tell you that by sticking to your goals, having a tremendous corporate culture, some bean bag chairs, and a hedge-fund manager as your uncle, you too could be swimming in money on the next cover.

What if it doesn’t happen like that? Where are the sad stories, the sagacious writings, and the hard-won wisdom of the thousands of entrepreneurs who started ‘Legbook’, ‘Woogle’ and ‘Armazon’? If seven out of ten small business start-ups fail (made up statistic, but seems about right), there are probably some great tales of what NOT to do out there… Why not tell you fine folks about our own cautionary tales?

And so here they are: a string of short stories, all moderately funny or tragic in the Fawlty Towers’ tradition, and all bound together pretending to be a book. It’s out now, you bought it, stole it from an ex-boyfriend or have read the entire prologue in an airport convenience store (don’t forget your boarding pass). Enjoy the rest of it in the knowledge of the following facts:

Writing a book does not help you lose 5 lbs… Maybe I need to do a sequel?

You helped me start my new ‘life on the beach’, albeit in a small town, called Beach, in North Dakota.

Thank you and Good Luck in any similar endeavors…

INTRODUCTION

This is the beginning bit of the book.

PEARLS BEFORE SWINE

A couple of ‘pearls of wisdom’ that stuck with me over the years include those on a wall plaque that hung in my Grandparents’ kitchen, which declared:

A boat is a hole in the water into which one throws money

As part-owner of two dilapidated speedboats in days gone by, there is nothing truer to be said. But breaking down on Lake Mead with a potential girlfriend (and future wife) got me thinking that there are many other cash-vacuums out there:

Foreign princes with $5M who need your bank account details to share the dosh with you.

Small businesses.

The second such pearl of wisdom should be a Christmas cracker joke, but probably isn’t:

Question: How do you make a small fortune in business today?

Answer: Start with a large fortune.

I have seen this up-front and personal, not only with my own business (and our unfortunate investors), but also with other well-funded, earnest and hard-working folk around me.

Therefore, I have new-found respect for all snippets of collective wisdom like this. Was there anything that your Grandma told you that wasn’t proven absolutely right 30 years later?

Precisely! The chair does tip backwards.

I have now taken to eating far more fortune cookies than my metabolism is comfortable with. Therein, I am certain, lie many more such nuggets of business genius. You should try it.

WHEEL RIGHT

Of course, I knew none of this when I embarked on a post-military-retirement business venture at the tender age of 39 and a bit. My last tour was as a NATO staff officer, which was roundly and fairly mocked as meaning ‘Not at The Office’ or ‘Nothing After Two O’clock’.

I had to keep going to pseudo-military conferences and listening to a series of press-ganged junior officers give potted lectures about their assorted units. They would then get jumped by a bunch of corporate Business Development (or ‘BD’) folk from all the big defense contractors.

None of these poor kids had any authority to sign anything and they just piled all the business cards on top of all the other ones they got from