Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

You Are Only as Good as Your Team

Mr. PrintMan accepted me as his mentee, and I set out on the next step, building a million-dollar mastermind team.  I reached into my network and contacted those who had the most ambition.  I told each of them the story and about the book.  A few of them were not interested, but I finally landed a team of interested, enthusiastic people who wanted to get rich.  My team consisted of five engineers and Mr. PrintMan.  Simon was an industrial engineer and a high school friend.  He has always been into real estate, and was interested in the real estate and software as a service part of the group.  Mr. Android was a co-worker and a computer engineer; he was interested in creating the world’s largest touchscreen Android device.  Mr. TownSend was a university friend; he was interested in these projects and in real estate in a small town. Mr. LadiesMan already had real estate in Niagara, and was interested in offloading these units.  Our attack was simple: find a few projects we could dominate, with a good set of cash flow, and execute.

I got all of us together for a meet and greet with Mr. PrintMan at the cigar lounge.  Mr. PrintMan immediately was able to charm and influence the entire group.  I could see him taking over the role of leading the charge, something I knew was missing in all my previous start-ups.  After the meeting, Mr. PrintMan pulled me aside and apologized for taking over the meeting and leading. Mr. PrintMan has always been very good at reading people.  However, I was relieved that someone would be leading the charge.  This happened a few more times; I would set up a meeting, and Mr. PrintMan would take charge.  After a while, I realized this was something I wanted to learn.  During one of our phone calls, I told Mr. PrintMan I had a strong desire to learn leadership.  It was at this point he taught me that leadership could be learned.  He introduced me to the author John C. Maxwell, and The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.

Then, we all gathered one night at Mr. PrintMan's cigar lounge. Mr. PrintMan is a man of vision; he makes things happen. There, we decided our method was the HOTS method, which stands for Hare, Owl, Tortoises, and Squirrels. Most people fall naturally into one of two major categories: hares or tortoises. Whenever you're constructing a team, you need to have hares that can break out of the mode of regular thinking, and tortoises, those who can actually convert the idea into reality. Tortoises take tasks and complete them. Once we understood the classifications of personality types, we split the group into sub-teams. Each sub-team had its own idea of how to make six million dollars. To direct the process, I got the teams to start brainstorming. The method for brainstorming ideas came directly from the book, The One Minute Millionaire.