Like every weekend, I took some time to research and read. Mostly researching how other people built fortunes, what skills they have, how they handle bills and other entrepreneurial stuff.
And I came across a series called undercover billionaire.
The premise is awesome: A self made millionaire/ billionaire has 90 days to create a business in a random town in the US with only 100.-$, a phone and a car to start. After 90 days, they evaluate the business and it has to be evaluated at one million dollars. If it is not, they put their own money in it.
Now this is crazy. 90 days is nothing. I take at least 4 weeks to verify if an idea is worth building, and I do that without having to search for food and shelter as well. Thus, I pretty much binge watched it while writing content and it was really inspiring to see how these seasoned, big business trained people struggle and almost cry to give up because it is so hard to build a business from scratch.
And it made me think. To some degree it is similar to what I set myself to do as an entrepreneur when I started the first time. They merely have to do it at a higher pace and these people that actually know what they do. I kinda have to figure it out along the way, and not having a camera crew following you also reduces your credibility quite a bit.
I see the series as educational and highly motivational.
However, you need to digest it with a grain of salt.
First, it is motivational, although probably a tad unrealistic for other people to reproduce this. You see, if you have a professional camera crew with a license following you, you have a weird intriguing aspect / credibility to your person.
I know I would also be curious and overlook a lot of irregularities to see what happens if someone came with a camera crew and so much ambition: There must be some interesting reason why the camera follows that person. At worst, I might get scammed, else I get a ton of promo on TV. I don't say it is impossible, but even in the US it is a different game without that crew around you.
What I am getting at is, that the challenge relies heavily on human connection and goodwill from other people. The show uses it to highlight the American Dream and that 'American People' will help each other to prove that they work hard, help each other and make dreams possible. Which is a nice selling point.
However, in other cultures, if your life story is obviously not checking out, it might be a tad more difficult, especially without a crew around you. Imagine being in Switzerland with a weak back story that does not check out, no money and trying to convince people to give you money and work for free for you. Not happening.
Second, what makes the series cool is to see their skills in practice, how they can scale up ideas so quickly, how they persuade people and how they approach it. For this, this content is absolute gold, I learned a ton of business principles from this series, crazy. However, these entrepreneurs took decades to get this good, to get this self confident, to get the skills to do that.
They built businesses and failed before, many many times. This has to stay in the back of your mind when you watch it. It becomes particularly clear in series two with Grant Cardone. The guy is amazing with putting vision to paper fast, he created a 50+ pages marketing guide overnight by himself and even states, that he has been in over 50'000 meetings with people - clients, investors, legal, directors, managers and so on.
He can talk real estate at a high volume professional level and he knows it at such detail, that he can educate his business partner on niche real estate tactics. You can not replicate that knowledge, even if you managed small real estate condos for years. You can learn it, but not that fast.
The third point is the location. The US are special in many regards, as they foster entrepreneurial behaviour more than a lot of European countries together. For instance, you can't go and collect scrap from rundown places and sell them in most European countries. If you live for instance in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, in Italy, in Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and so on, there is a high chance that you get arrested for this behaviour. Thus you need a different strategy to make money for everything. For instance, Glenn in season one flipped a house. If you look at the housing prices in the UK, Germany, Finland, Iceland.. you don't just flip a home... you can also not buy a house for 40k.
In fact, you will not even find a single room apartment for that amount of cash. On top of that, in many countries you can not do money transfers with officials that are over 10k Euros for legal reasons. And so on. Thus, location is a big thing on how you would approach such a challenge.
Edutainment in context
You have to take this series in context - where it is and what the background of the people is. Then you can learn a ton from them. Like, finding a job by going to a market and asking farmers to be a day-worker for direct pay is an awesome strategy. But what is more, you can take away a lot about negotiation, about giving back to communities, believing in people and caring for others.
If you can digest the series for this, it is one hell of a motivational piece that proves, that it is indeed possible to build a business from scratch and to do good.
And that it is brutal work, excruciatingly exhausting and 97% of the time it is absolutely frustrating to build a business.
But you can pull through, and it can be worth the effort.
The best dress you can put on is confidence. - Elaine Culotti
If you want to build a company yourself for the first time, you will fail.
Often. You have to fail forward and learn along the way. It takes years to learn these skills and become exceptional. Which is exciting. You simply need to know what you are signing up for.
So yeah, really cool series.
On a personal note: I recommend Monique Idlett’s Arc. She is just wonderful in how she approached the challenge. That is my two cents.
See you around.