How I Broke Through Segregation to Launch a Business Empire
0912777842
Herman J. Russell
Notes
Reverend Wilkes preached that we should start our own business so we could keep more of our money to benefit our community. He said that we had to start relying on each other, that we should pool our money to start businesses, then support each other’s business.
You have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone sometimes in order to position yourself for success. Because stepping outside of yourself often means adjusting and acclimating yourself to a new environment, it means you have to be willing to take a longer-term view of things.
I’m often asked how I could own a portfolio of almost two thousand rental units, a property management company, and an insurance agency by the age of forty. The answer is easy: I didn’t spend money on showy, expensive offices. I didn’t do a lot of unnecessary travel. I didn’t spend my money on expensive clothes and jewelry. I didn’t eat in expensive restaurants and I didn’t drive expensive cars. I didn’t even buy a car or move out of my parents’ home until I was twenty-six. I held onto my earnings and reinvested in my own company – and myself. That increased my return on investment (ROI) manyfold.
When the head real estate guy in a small southern town is on your side and he wants the commission, he will promote you to the nth degree. Never failed. (Don’t share the commission)
Scott’s (Hudgens) approach was to always buy the land even if he did not have immediate plans for it.
In our business, what comes first is know-how: there’s no substitute for it. If you don’t have it and if you don’t master what you engage in, you’re heading for disaster. To give your best, you’ve got to be married to what you’re engaging in. That’s the only way, in my opinion, success is going to happen for you… My philosophy, as a chief executive, is work hard … and always stay focused. Also look for people much smarter than you,
…(Russell) had a simple way of distilling it down to two or three questions for making a deal:
- How much money am I going to have to put in?
- What is my risk going to be?
- What else are you asking me to do beyond the money that may be reflective of some kind of commitment.
“But you’ve got to cut your own grass first. You want to run across the street and cut your neighbor’s yard but your grass is up over the roof.”…his point was that we were taking care of all this other stuff everywhere else, but here in our own back yard, we weren’t taking care of home.