Reading is the most profitable activity I know
__And the cheapest way to become a great entrepreneur... [start your kids early and often!]
This weekend I decided to revisit the story of probably the most inspiring black entrepreneur of all time: Reginald F. Lewis. He was the first black entrepreneur to control a global billion-dollar business and to reach Forbes's top 400 richest people on the planet.
Immediately I hear some of you say “Reginald who?”
By re-reading a book on him called “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?" I was reminded once again how this guy so inspired me as a young entrepreneur that in 1992, whilst visiting America on a study tour, I visited the town of his birth, Baltimore, to learn more about his life!
I had been following stories about him for about five years back then. For me, he was the entrepreneurial equivalent of what Ronaldo is to football or Michael Jordan to basketball.
The deal he did to take over a company called Beatrice Foods in the late 1980s was one of the biggest of its kind in the world, and to imagine it had been done by a black entrepreneur shook the business world. After doing the deal Reggie and his wife moved to Paris and ran a business that spun the globe.
That deal totally inspired me, and I don’t think a black entrepreneur has yet pulled off anything close to it since!
To pull off something similar today would be the equivalent of a black entrepreneur buying a global company in a deal worth $50bn, and then moving to Paris to run it...
It was insanely audacious!
It was not so much that this deal was valued at over a billion dollars to buy, but the sheer complexity of the transaction including how the money was raised.
__This showed me at the time that if you have the right skills and know what you are doing almost anything is possible.
Some of you will remember the post series that called “Buying and Selling Businesses, is also Business”; it was through reading about this particular transaction that I really became alive to studying how this was done. Knowing that a black person like me had pulled it off made me believe I could one day do it.
Interestingly, the first black billionaire on the Forbes list was the South African mining entrepreneur Patrice Motsepe whose own background as a corporate lawyer was remarkably similar to that of Reggie Lewis. Patrice’s acquisition of mining businesses which he consolidated into a mining conglomerate used almost exactly the same approach as Reggie.
And when he did it, some of us nicknamed him “The Reggie Lewis of Africa” in honor of the great American who by then had died of cancer at the relatively young age of 50 years.
In my own small way, I used the same approach when we bought the South African operations of an Indian telecoms group. Our own deal was also “leveraged” and was valued at just under a billion dollars.
I literally “copied and pasted” what Reggie had done including even a Eurobond to take out the bank syndicated loans. We then split the company in two to unlock value. That I was able to do this in a country that was not my home country made me a good student of Reggie Lewis as well.
Let me close by saying this:
When I first put out a blog here all those years ago, I advised you to read financial and business news every day with a pen and paper, as though your very entrepreneurial success depends on it—because it does...
This is how some of us have learnt about how business is really done. And at weekends, whilst others are watching sports, we find a good business book about titans past and present and learn about what and how they did it. Then when a chance comes to try something using what we learnt, we know how it was done before us.
When Reggie died of brain cancer in 1993, the business world saluted an extraordinary entrepreneur. All around the world entrepreneurs were beginning to ask his audacious question which is the title of a book on him:
“Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?" By Reginald F. Lewis, Blair S. Walker. Here's a link to the audio book: https://reginaldflewis.com/audiobook/
His widow, who took over the leadership of the company after his death, recently released her own book (memoir) entitled: “Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?”
And talking of great women entrepreneurs, did you know that a black woman called Madam CJ Walker was the first black self-made millionaire in history? She did it in the nineteen twenties, long before any man, and just decades after the end of slavery. Her path was simply unbelievable.
Reading is the most profitable activity I know, and the cheapest way to become a great entrepreneur.
Image caption: Education of our children starts with reading to and with them... LONG before the age of THREE. This article has some hints to get you started if you're a new parent: https://www.zerotothree.org/resource/read-early-and-often/
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