How One Book Changed My Life
“The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and How it Changed the Trajectory of my Entrepreneurial Life
by Matthieu McClintock
I had just turned 21 years old and returned from two failed ventures, the first being Watchtower Pictures — which I founded at 19 and discussed at length in Part I of this series — and the second of which was my short-lived foray into Hollywood Filmmaking discussed at length in Part II of my entrepreneurial endeavor series. It had only been six months since I was spending night and day on Hollywood film sets and was just starting out adapting to life as a regular Joe in Orlando, Florida.
It was a bit depressing as I spent the previous two years on a non-stop roller coaster of adrenaline and excitement and — seemingly overnight — shifted to the perpetual boredom of spending my days making cold calls at a call center and my nights trying to finish school at the local community college. I was unsure about what I wanted to do next and went from being the master of my own destiny to having lost the confidence in myself that had driven me to the very reaches of success in the previous two years. That all changed when the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman landed in my hands.
Every minute I was not working or in school I read and re-read every chapter of the book and conducted further research into the many insights that the novel provided and suddenly, I felt a drive, an ambition, a burning desire to do something in the world. Learning about Globalization and Web 2.0 in the framework in which Friedman presented his theories and facts lit a fire in me that would forever alter the trajectory of my life. I started small by working harder, studying more, learning outside of the classroom and developing an addicting reading habit.
I decided to start my “new life” by learning about Finance and poured through books dating back to Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor”, the bible of value investing, written by the mentor of Warren Buffet. I read every annual letter to shareholders written by Warren Buffet dating back to the inception of Berkshire Hathaway in the 1970’s and began a small stock portfolio as I read every quarterly and annual report of publicly traded companies I could find and listened to the quarterly calls of all publicly traded companies of interest. I was on a mission to learn everything I possibly could about the world Friedman described in his book that — unbeknownst to me — I was now living in.
It turned out I had a natural knack for value investing and after showing massive returns to a friend from college I began managing financial portfolios for my friends, fellow-students, and co-workers — the maximum value of which was $10,000. After six months or so the referrals came flooding in and I had started a very casual investment advisement firm in which I advised and executed trades for clients. It was fun, I didn’t look at it like work. I watched CNBC every minute I wasn’t working or in school and constantly monitored the markets and poured through reports and even contacted publicly traded companies to gain further insight. And then people noticed.
I was offered a job by a Real Estate Investment Trust, commonly known as a REIT, which was in desperate need of someone with a mind for finance to evaluate their portfolio and both advise and execute on ways to add value and cut unnecessary expenses or redundant operational logistics. This job led me into the wonderful world of marketing, which, despite all the reviews of balance sheets and income statements in the world, every problem ultimately led me to. I started with one property that was in the red. I implemented several initiatives, many of which would fall into the category of marketing, and fixed major problems like delinquency, walk-in and online traffic, rental and renewal rates and created a customer service plan to ensure these improvements remained.
My success with one property led to my being the “fixer” for the company as I was sent to whichever properties were in bad financial shape and once I had worked my “magic”, I was sent to the next one. I remained in college but worked at properties in Orlando, Lakeland, Boynton Beach, and Jacksonville while also advising property managers within our portfolio from Florida to Pennsylvania. I loved problem solving and what I enjoyed doing was financially rewarding — something I’d find out later was not common. Every property had different issues whether it was poor product, that is apartments that were old and hadn’t been renovated in decades, or perhaps the communities themselves were dangerous and had rough crime rates. There were also larger problems like delinquency that had run amok or perhaps more skilled competition that were smothering our properties. Most of the time, however, it was the lack of communication between the personnel on the ground and the executives at our corporate HQ.
The nature of being in the REIT business is everyone has an extremely specific job whether it is being a leasing agent, a marketing director, a customer service agent, a maintenance technician, property manager, etc. and none of these roles involved looking at the big picture. They were all what I’d call day-to-day operations jobs. In my capacity as the “fixer”, as I was given a slew of job titles that weren’t really indicative of what I did, I began to notice patterns and drew up a portfolio wide treatise on the many issues I faced head on and how I solved them by working with on-site teams. I then shifted from being a doer traveling from property to property to a “consultant” where portfolio executives and regional managers came to me with problems which I would examine and promptly respond with a solution the regional and on-site managers would then implement. Then I got bored.
Because of my age (22) and lack of a college education — as I was one year away from graduating — the company refused to align my salary with my job. I also got tired of dealing with the same issues over and over again and began looking for something more exciting, particularly in Web 2.0, as college graduation finally came within sight. As I mentioned earlier, “marketing”, a term which to this day I still laugh at, was integral to what I did at the REIT and I honed in on a very specific type of marketing where I saw a potential for major growth — mobile. The year was 2010 and consumer adoption of smartphones was skyrocketing and the returns I found in implementing mobile marketing campaigns for the REIT were hugely successful.
I entertained starting a smartphone insurance company at the time with the intention of using the insurance float to grow my portfolio, much like Warren Buffet did, but ended up going a different route. I spent three months doing research and assembling a business plan to start a full-service mobile advertising company with proprietary SMS software and strategic partnerships with wholesale providers of mobile search and display, Internet radio, and location-based marketing services. I called a good friend at Lockheed Martin whose stock portfolio I had managed for years and asked if he’d go to lunch with me. He was completely blindsided.
I sat down with one common thread in my mind, I would not accept no as an answer. I would impose my will on my friend. It may sound harsh but I was passionate about the potential of the company and knew that the ROI for my friend would tower over anything I had made for him in the market. I told him the truth, discussed the business plan, showed him I was committed, and to close him, promised I would leave lunch, return to the office and resign effective immediately if he funded my new venture. He said yes and returned to Lockheed as I returned to my office and resigned.
I went back to my apartment and set the wheels in motion for the company that had only existed in my mind for months. After nearly a year of arriving in Orlando via Hollywood, I had finally put my cards on the table. I had raised seed funding, resigned from my role at the REIT, dropped out of college, and to add a bit more cash into the mix I sold my car. I hadn’t just put my cards on the table, I had gone “all-in.”
I will discuss my adventure into mobile in further detail in Part IV of my entrepreneurial endeavor series.
