Raised As An Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur Experience

Raised As An Entrepreneur

My father was always an entrepreneur and a risk taker, from the time he was a boy and he and his brothers ran away from home and joined the circus.

When I was 5 years old he used to take me out and point to a building. “How much is that building worth?” he would ask. “As much as you can get for it” was the correct answer. He taught me to play poker so I could gauge risk. It was the entrepreneur seed planted early.

My Mother was not an entrepreneur, but she was a perfectionist. So, with her pushing me forward and staring over my shoulder, she taught me to keep pushing the envelope to go beyond expectations, to achieve another level of results. And business is all about results. Not what you wish you could have done, or intended to do but how many widgets you actually sold, how many products you actually shipped ( not dreamt or talked about, or even engineered but shipped). And, ultimately, it’s about how much actual money you brought in after all the expense were paid. That is the bottom line, in more ways than one.

So fast forward:

Starting Out As An Entrepreneur

In my twenties, after college at Wellesley and graduating from Columbia University in New York City, I hit the ground running. I managed 20,000 acres of ranch land and mineral leases in 5 counties, the traditional Texas businesses. I bought and sold a small apartment building near Fort Sam Houston military base. I built and sold one of the first office buildings using “tilt slab” construction ( a crane lowered the walls in place). Through extensive research, using thermal satellite scans, heat measuring instruments and pouring through 100 years of private journals and diaries documenting the weather, I established a new viticultural region in West Texas, cool as Northern California and parts of France. This meant it was not a hot area which would only support table wine, but rather a cool area which could produce premium wines. My study actually overturned a study executed by A&M, hired by the University of Texas which owns hundreds of thousands of acres in the area. ( A&M had used weather records from Marfa, 20 miles away, but actually in a different, hotter degree region. The difference for UT meant the difference between $300 an acre land and $2,000 to $8,000 an acre land. I subsequently began collaborating the the University of Texas Board of Regents.) I then started the first commercial Vinifera ( fine European and California wine grape) vineyard in Texas, wrote, found sponsors for and passed the legislation which enabled and launched the now billion dollar wine industry in Texas. I opened a wine bar to teach people about wines. After which, enchanted with the Colonial culture, cobblestone streets and Cathedrals in the heart of Mexico, I decided to spend some time in a different culture. I constructed and managed a surgical clinic and recovery villas with a partner in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico, recruiting the best surgeons in Mexico City and Guadalajara to operate. In about five years, the Internet as we know it began to emerge, and I decided to return to the states and cast my lot with that new frontier. See Pioneering on the Net.

Call me or email me if you’d like to discuss how I can help you with your start-up, your website, blog or social marketing on the Net.

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