Tag: shares

Tony Robbins shares the most important thing he’s learned from coaching billionaires

Tony Robbins shares the most important thing he’s learned from coaching billionaires

by | Apr 6, 2016 | 0 |

tony robbins

Tony Robbins has coached some of the wealthiest people in the world, working with clients ranging from tennis legend Andre Agassi to President Bill Clinton.

Along the way, he’s mastered his own money — the premiere performance coach and author of “MONEY: Master The Game” went from a cash-strapped upbringing to an estimated net worth of $440 million.

In a recent episode of Lewis Howes’ podcast, “The School of Greatness,” Robbins shared a fundamental lesson he’s learned from coaching the wealthiest of the wealthy: “Who you spend time with is who you become,” he told Howes.

There’s a reason the wealthiest, most successful people tend to hang out with other wealthy, successful people.

As T. Harv Eker explains in his book, “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,” “Successful people look at other successful people as a means to motivate themselves. They see other successful people as models to learn from. They say to themselves, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.'”

Associating with ambitious and driven individuals is also the key to staying hungry, even in the face of success, Robbins told Howes: “When I started coaching all these billionaires, there was a part of me that said, ‘I’m as smart in certain areas as they are. I’ve got to step my game up … Get around where it’s better and things will hit you.”

After interviewing more than 1,200 of the world’s wealthiest people and becoming a self-made millionaire himself, author Steve Siebold came to a similar conclusion as Robbins: “Exposure to people who are more successful than you are has the potential to expand your thinking and catapult your income … The reality is, millionaires think differently from the middle class about money, and there’s much to be gained by being in their presence.”

While often overlooked — or dismissed as elitist — your friendships could have a major impact on your financial success, and befriending wealthy people could even help you get rich. That’s not to say you should ditch your average-income friends or screen new acquaintances by net worth, but you might want to take into consideration what you can learn from the friends you have and the friends you make.

As Siebold explains, “In most cases, your net worth mirrors the level of your closest friends … We become like the people we associate with, and that’s why winners are attracted to winners.”

SEE ALSO: Here’s what Warren Buffett said when Tony Robbins asked him how he got so rich

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A former undocumented immigrant who rose to a $340,000 position at Goldman Sachs shares her career advice

A former undocumented immigrant who rose to a $340,000 position at Goldman Sachs shares her career advice

by | Apr 1, 2016 | 0 |

Julissa Arce

Julissa Arce was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico when she worked her way up from an intern to a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

She’s written a book about her life, and shared her strategy for success at the Wall Street investment bank in an op-ed for CNBC.com.

Arce spent seven years at Goldman working in structured derivatives for the private wealth division.

She began as a college intern making $10,000 for the summer. By the time she was 27, she was promoted to vice president, making $340,000 per year.

She explains her strategy:

Once I was at Goldman, I created another plan to turn my internship into a full time job. Once I had the full-time offer, I turned that plan into, “How to become the first Hispanic woman partner at Goldman.” I came up with that plan after reading books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” ” 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and others.

My strategy was:

1. Check in with my bosses periodically on my progress

2. Set and receive expectations for compensation

3. Be intentional about promotions

4. Self-promote (something many people are afraid to do) and 5) Be flexible.

She recommends sitting down with your boss at the beginning of the year to go over your your progress and goals. Then, in the summer, she suggests checking in with your boss on your progress, asking questions such if you’re on track for a promotion or a raise.

It’s smart and simple advice.

By the end of the year, your boss can refer to the goals that you outlined. At the very least, your boss can look back on the goals you gave him or her and measure your performance and give promotions and bonuses accordingly.

Arce left Goldman in 2011 and, eventually, Wall Street all together. She’s a resident of the US, and now a writer, speaker, and social justice advocate. This September, she’s publishing her own memoir, “My (Underground) American Dream.”

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A star Morgan Stanley banker shares her best career advice for women

A star Morgan Stanley banker shares her best career advice for women

by | Mar 30, 2016 | 0 |

Carla HarrisCarla Harris doesn’t normally give gender-specific advice to young people.

But there is one point that the Morgan Stanley dealmaker, who is now vice chairman for global wealth management, emphasizes specifically when mentoring women.

“What I say, especially to young women, is, ‘Yes do a great job, put the points on the board, make sure that’s clear,'” Harris recently told Business Insider.

“But you must as quickly as possible start investing in the relationships around you. Don’t just put your head down and work, because you should have a relationship with every seat that touches your seat.”

Harris has landed some major deals throughout her 28 years on Wall Street, including the initial public offerings of UPS and Martha Stewart Living.

She has also built a career as an accomplished singer and published two books, in which she lays out her advice for young people.

Harris described two types of “currency” that employees can use in the workplace: performance currency and relationship currency.

“What I’ve found is that women tend to keep gravitating towards the performance currency, and what happens is, as you get more senior, the relationship currency is the more important currency,” Harris said.

The currency is generated by investing in the people in your work environment.

Harris said that as you rise through the ranks in your career, people start to assume that your performance is equal to that of your colleagues. You’re less likely to be ranked based on that currency the further you progress.

“What will make the difference for that next big assignment are the relationships that you have,” she said.

“Because that next assignment is going to be based on somebody’s judgment — judgment about whether or not you’re ready, judgment about whether or not you’ll be successful, judgment about whether or not the team or whoever else you need will actually follow you — and judgments are directly influenced by relationships.”

SEE ALSO: A Morgan Stanley exec says this is the one personality trait she looks for in every job candidate

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A CEO known for his exuberant speeches shares his favorite mental trick to prepare for a crowd of any size

A CEO known for his exuberant speeches shares his favorite mental trick to prepare for a crowd of any size

by | Mar 14, 2016 | 0 |

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk approaches a presentation the same way a boxer approaches a fight.

When stage time is eight minutes away, you wouldn’t be able to tell he’s about to give a talk, Vaynerchuk says in his new book “#AskGaryVee.” He’s just calmly going through his normal routine. But then exactly six minutes before, he gets into “a weird place.”

The outspoken CEO of VaynerMedia isn’t reviewing notes or repeating lines under his breath, but rather gets into a state of intense focus fueled by adrenaline, like a fighter about to walk to the ring.

“Then, right before I go out onstage, I think about punching every audience member directly in the mouth,” Vaynerchuk writes.

“I know it sounds strange, but I feel a weird mix of love and aggression for the people in the seats, because on one hand I’m so grateful for their presence and their support and interest, yet I’m also determined to send them away with a powerful message ringing in their ears.”

Rather than spend his time memorizing every word of a finely crafted speech, Vaynerchuk prepares the elements of his presentation based on what genuinely interests him, so that the emotions he expresses are real.

The secret to landing all of your punches, he says, is simple: Talk about what you know.

Vaynerchuk explains that the only way you’ll become a more engaging speaker is through practice and refinement of your technique, but the best technique won’t matter if you’re not “speaking from the heart and from experience.” The audience will easily see through acting or a weak grasp of a subject.

In an interview with Business Insider, Vaynerchuk said that despite all of the bravado and amusingly erratic behavior he’s known for on stage and in front of the camera, he’s quite collected and humble when doing business for his digital media company. It’s just that he understands the importance of the performance aspect of public speaking and wants to grab his audience and unleash what he’s got to say.

He says that his boxer analogy may not work for everyone, but he recommends that, regardless of your speaking style, you don’t let nervous energy force you to second-guess yourself in the final minutes leading up to your talk. You’ll risk throwing everything off. You don’t need to fantasize about punching out the guy in the front row, but use your nervous energy the same way a boxer does, feeling it empower you.

“The day you find yourself in this moment, have confidence in yourself and go with your plan,” he writes. “You’ve worked hard for this. You’re ready.”

SEE ALSO: The founder of a multimillion-dollar company says he’s ‘stunned’ by a disturbing trend he sees among CEOs

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‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’ shares his secrets to happiness and success

‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’ shares his secrets to happiness and success

by | Mar 13, 2016 | 0 |

Dos Equis released its final ad featuring actor Jonathan Goldsmith as “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” Goldsmith began playing the role in 2006.

We asked 77-year-old Goldsmith about his greatest life lessons and advice on how to be happy and successful in the face of adversity.

Produced by Graham Flanagan

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A victim of the dot-com bust shares five pieces of advice for startups caught in today’s ‘bubble’

A victim of the dot-com bust shares five pieces of advice for startups caught in today’s ‘bubble’

by | Mar 7, 2016 | 0 |

Full Circle CRM Founderand CEO Bonnie Crater

You can still hear the wince in Bonnie Crater’s voice when she talks about Zelerate, the ecommerce software company she ran between 1999 and 2001. 

During the dotcom boom, the company raised about $15 million and burned through most of that money on growth, fully expecting that it would easily raise another round. 

But then the bubble popped.

“I’d hired these 100 people, and then I had to fire them all,” Crater tells Business Insider. “It was devasting. I felt like I ruined their lives.”

The company officially shut down not long afterwards. 

Crater says it took her years to come to terms with what had happened and her role in it. She worked at several companies, including Salesforce, before she decided to plunge back into the startup world by founding a customer management company, Full Circle Insights, in 2011. 

But when Crater looks at today’s tech climate, she says she’s starting to see signs of the next pop.

She’s particularly worried about some of the sky-high valuations and the subsequent pressure for rocketship growth. For a recent example, consider Zenefits, the troubled startup that has attributed some of its recent issues to cut corners and an unrealistic thirst for expansion. 

As someone who did it wrong the first time, here’s her biggest advice for today’s startups:

1. Really understand the numbers and do not run out of money

“Whatever you do, don’t run out of money,” she says. “I know that sounds very simple, but it’s a common issue.”

For an idea of how widespread that particular problem is, check out this recent chart from CB Insights:

The top 20 reasons startups fail – I particularly love the imagery of a “pivot gone bad”https://t.co/wrEsqgy0hI pic.twitter.com/bUTB5ibW3L

— Chris Maddern (@chrismaddern) March 6, 2016

2. Taking too much money is bad 

“When startups raise a lot of money, they often waste a lot of money,” she said. “Taking too much money is bad.”

The unicorn companies make her very nervous.

“When young people come to me and my company and say, ‘Wow, we just raised $50 million!’ I’ll be like, ‘Yup, beginning of the end,'” she says. “Because investors are expecting a 10x return on that valuation. So say a company’s valuation is $100 million. You have to be a billion-dollar company to be successful! And that’s really, really hard.” 

3. Be intentional about your company culture

Turnover is incredibly expensive, Crater says. 

Finding candidates and onboarding them takes time, effort, and money. If a startup isn’t clear from the get-go on its culture and what kind of people will flourish while working there, it is more likely to have a lot of employee churn. 

Although she thinks that company culture is incredibly important, she doesn’t think that expensive perks are necessary. Perks are nice, but most people just want to work somewhere where they feel like their contribution is valued. 

“We have a ping-pong table and happy hour and free lunches once a week, but that’s not what the company is about,” she says. “We want people passionate about helping marketers get better at their craft.”

You need to find people who believe in the mission of your company. 

4. Make sure you have an annual plan that everyone understands

“Everyone should understand what your values are and what you stand for as a group,” she says. 

Because Crater and several other employees are Salesforce vets, they’ve adopted Marc Benioff’s “V2MOM” model at Full Circle. The acronym stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and methods. There’s a question tied to each — for example vision: what do you want to do? and values: what’s most important about that vision? — and answering the questions tied to each of those keywords has driven Craters new company ever since. 

Employees should know the company’s big picture goals in order to best manage their time and priorities and stay aligned.

“Everybody should be working on the same page,” she said. 

5. Hire your sales team at the right time

“A big mistake I’ve seen people make is hiring their VP of sales too soon,” Crater says. “Before they’ve fully figured out their product-market fit. And then that person is wasted.”

Startups who hire a senior exec before they’ve concretely answered questions like ‘who needs this product and why?’ will ultimately end up misspending a lot of cash.  

SEE ALSO: Meerkat is quitting the live video streaming it pioneered, admitting defeat to Twitter and Facebook

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‘Shark Tank’ investor Daymond John shares 9 business books he thinks everyone should read

‘Shark Tank’ investor Daymond John shares 9 business books he thinks everyone should read

by | Feb 29, 2016 | 0 |

daymond john

As a 14-year-old, Daymond John had yet to be diagnosed with dyslexia but knew that he struggled with reading.

But there was one book — Napoleon Hill’s 1937 classic “Think and Grow Rich” — that so enthralled him that he not only pushed through it, but decided to read it again every year.

In John’s own book, “The Power of Broke,” he writes that the tome profoundly changed his mindset from focusing on what he didn’t want to become to instead concentrating on what he did want to become. This shift allowed him to start the FUBU clothing brand in his early 20s and then grow it into a multimillion-dollar business, he says.

In a recent Reddit AMA, the “Shark Tank” investor shared several books that he thinks every new entrepreneur should read. We’ve collected them here along with some books John previously told Business Insider had changed his life.

SEE ALSO: ‘Shark Tank’ investor Daymond John says this daily ritual changed his life

‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill

When the legendary businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie met Hill as a young journalist in 1908, Carnegie decided he liked Hill so much that he would use him as a vehicle for distributing the strategies he considered responsible for his success. This essentially launched Hill’s career as one of the founders of the personal-success genre.

Hill’s greatest work, “Think and Grow Rich,” was first published in 1937 and became one of the top-selling books of all time. It’s a collection of insights derived from interviews with Carnegie, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford that teaches readers how to develop the drive and habits necessary to maximize one’s potential.

“The main takeaway from that was goal-setting,” John says. “It was the fact that if you don’t set a specific goal, then how can you expect to hit it?” One of the fundamental ideas in the book is determining your purpose in life and working toward concrete milestones.

John says that “Think and Grow Rich” made him realize that when he didn’t set very specific goals for himself, he could find himself making excuses for why he wasn’t working as hard as he could.

Find it here »

‘How to Win Friends & Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie

John says that he’s a fan of all of Carnegie’s books. Carnegie was a contemporary of Hill’s, and his writings on how to maximize success have had just as much longevity.

Carnegie’s most widely read book is “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” first published in 1936. It is a collection of advice on self-promotion and describes how the most influential people listen more than they speak.

Warren Buffett famously took Carnegie’s class on the subject when he was 20 and still has the diploma he received for it in his office.

Find it here »

‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ by Spencer Johnson

Johnson’s parable has been a consistently best-selling business book since it was released in 1998. It tells the story of two mice and two sprite-like people living in a maze where the location of the cheese suddenly starts changing every day.

When Johnson wrote the book, companies around the world were adapting to the rise of a more accessible internet and new ways of doing business. Its lessons on how to let go of a fear of change, however, are timeless.

John says that he used to think that throwing money at a failing business would somehow save it, but at this point in his career he understands that he needs to take a more measured approach.

“Money’s not going to make it any better. It may make the opportunity come faster, but it also can hurt you if you think that money’s going to solve it,” John says.

Find it here »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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A CEO shares the surprising lesson he learned from selling his company for $4 billion

by | Feb 28, 2016 | 0 |

bob carr

Last November, Bob Carr signed a deal to sell his payments processing company Heartland Payment Systems for $100 a share to Global Payments, for a total of $4.3 billion.

The deal made him a very rich man, but it also taught him a surprising lesson about the meaning of work.

Both public companies in the same industry, Global Payments had a thriving business abroad but a weak influence in the US, and Heartland’s sizeable American customer base among small and midsize merchants was a perfect complement.

Carr, 70, declined a board seat and decided to step away from the company he founded in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1997. Although he hadn’t been planning to sell, Heartland’s healthy performance and the generous offer convinced him that ending this chapter in his life was worth it.

The move also required that six of his direct reports cash out of the company. Yet, while it made them much richer, it left them unhappy. The CFO, for example, made $65 million on the deal and is 60 years old, but now feels lost, Carr told Business Insider.

“I just never really appreciated that until the sale of the company,” Carr said. It made him realize how valuable it is to do something that you love.

“We didn’t always talk about how wonderful it was to always be fighting the battle every day,” he said. Once that sense of purpose was gone, they became genuinely unhappy — despite being millionaires.

As for himself, he has the Give Something Back Foundation, which he founded 15 years ago to put underprivileged students through private high school and college, to occupy his days. Around 480 kids have gone through the program, and he is working on partnerships with the likes of celebrity performance coach Tony Robbins and NBA player Dwayne Wade. The foundation’s team expanded to 10 people last year.

But once Carr has steered it in the right direction, he knows it won’t need him to be hands-on any longer, which can be a scary thought.

“The foundation could be enough to keep me busy for the next 15 years,” he said, but “I suspect it won’t be.” The idea of spending the rest of his life on the golf course or in front of a television is out of the question. Even the idea of a week-long vacation feels wrong, he joked.

That’s why he’s in the planning stages of another company in the community banking space. He said that this moment in his life showed him that he still hasn’t lost what an early mentor called his “race with death.”

Carr grew up in a struggling working class family in Lockport, Illinois, to parents who both hated their jobs. Carr said that when he lost his religious faith as a young man, he decided that he needed to fit in as much as possible in the time he was given in life, and his experience as a child made him want to create his own business that would in turn give employees a job they could be proud of.

As he grew older, he stopped being driven by an increasing paycheck and instead became motivated by having an impact, he explained.

Even though the sale of his company was bittersweet, he feels assured by the prospect of both enhancing his foundation and creating something new.

“When I was in high school I thought, ‘OK, I see these 60-year-old people out there, and it doesn’t seem like they have that happy lives. They’re not proud of what they did. And I don’t want to be that way,'” he said.

“My greatest achievement is not building a $4.3 billion company — which shocks me to this day that it got that big — it’s having all these people doing great things,” he said, referring to the Heartland’s 4,600 employees. “It’s not just that we have great jobs; we’re doing great work. We’ve been changing the lives of 300,000 customers. Creating technology, doing things that have never been done before — it’s cool. It’s a privilege, too.”

SEE ALSO: 9 timeless lessons from the great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius

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