Dads, Entrepreneurialism and Grace
Volume 13, Number 3
Issue 603
I was very lucky in that my parents always talked about entrepreneurialism. My Dad was a self-employed Nationwide insurance agent for over thirty years and my Mom grew up hanging around her father's little grocery store in Bristol, Virginia in the 1920s and 30s. I had my first business-Dave's Stamps-in 1973 at age eleven when I began advertising in national magazines for stamp collectors where I learned by trial and error the strategies for buying, selling and marketing things. I still use many of those marketing strategies today as a sole practitioner Certified Public Accountant.
When I wasn't being a little entrepreneur at age 11 at gun and stamp shows in Richmond buying and selling stamps and civil war relics, I was hanging around my Dad-as many of us DID but FEW of us actually DO nowadays for our own kids--listening to his ideas about running a little hole in the wall business. I saw my Dad in a lot of different situations as a small businessman, but his greatest strength was that he simply enjoyed talking with his customers about what they did and how they did it.
Dad anonymously networked ideas about success in life from one customer to the next. Sometimes he would use the exact idea, but at other times he would combine, consolidate or re-work them. Clients thought that he was an intuitive and analytical person when all he really was a great listener who, when he did speak, shared an appropriate idea that he had learned somewhere along his life's journey.
I often wonder what my Dad would have thought about my little accounting firm-the one I started back in 1990 with five clients in the unfinished attic of my house off Courthouse Road in Chesterfield County. He died in 1991 when my gross revenue was about 5% of what it is now.
My Dad loved McDonalds and Ray Kroc-the person who in 1961 bought the original McDonalds brothers out for $2.7 million dollars. Maybe because he identified with Kroc because they both served in the U. S. Army in their teens. Kroc once said, "It's a matter of having principles. It's easy to have principles when you're rich. The important thing is to have principles when you're poor."
Over a thirty-year career, my Dad maintained intense long-term relationships with a few select people--about five of them--whom he thought would teach him savvy things. He came to live by the philosophy that you would never run out of customers if you simply made sure that people depended on you and that you lived up to their expectations by enthusiastically solving their problems-whether or not they were related to his official profession. He felt that as an intelligent businessperson who had enjoyed success it was his obligation to give his wealth of knowledge back to people by having what he called "a fiduciary duty to serve the public, regardless of whether or not he was making money in the transaction at-hand."
But I feel my Dad had one very especially peculiar principle-at least when compared to the general standards of the 2005 business world as a whole. He knew that integrity was the most important key to unlock entrepreneurial business success and that there was no substitute for it and in fact, there was a dire shortage of it in the world. The irony is, that I don't think it's that peculiar; I've made my fortune on that principle and I require the few close allies that I have in my life to maintain it, too.
But, also, and even just as important as maintaining integrity, Bruce Robinson knew that entrepreneurial success would be unlimited if you had a reputation in the community for simply being kind and gracious.
David B. Robinson, CPA
Index of Previous Issues of Tax Fax
