How Liberal Studies Helped Me Create a Multi-Million Dollar Business
And why Liberal Studies is more than just a learning exercise
I co-founded and grew a multi-million dollar business that became an overnight success.
Well, it took us 38 years to get there, but then it was overnight at the end.
My co-founder, Tom Warrner, and I brought different skills to the business, and we were lucky to have remained working together — mostly amicably — and benefiting from each other’s interests and focus.
The business was technical (computer-based, and later web-based, training) and Tom brought his programming, systems analysis and operational management experiences to the enterprise. My background and interests came from business, marketing and lots of independent study and travel, and I focused more on company strategy, product offerings and marketing approaches.
But I got there because of my social science degrees and a broad dose of liberal studies.
In fact, I don’t think we could have grown or sold the business without either of our contributions, and I know that my background shaped the company into what it became.
[Full Disclosure: While the following will make it appear that my contribution to the business’s growth and eventual success was more important than my partner’s, I need to say that I would have put us out of business on at least three or four different junctures without Tom’s steadying hand on business operations.]
My undergraduate and master’s degrees were in political science — but I took massive amounts of history and English literature courses along the way — and Latin American history and business.
Dear moms and dads of the world: I hear you. You want to make sure your little Johnny and young Samantha get a real education, in something that will help them get a job — something like accounting, computer programming, or engineering. You know, the job-getting disciplines.
I know you’re saying:
“Hey, Werner… last time we checked, there aren’t too many job openings for Latin American historians. Get real, man!”
So let me explain.
When I got out of college with those “nothing” degrees, the best options for someone like me were in sales. Now, I didn’t have much sales experience (I did spend one summer peddling Fuller Brush door-to-door), but I did have three sales job offers: one to sell an accounting computer device (this was before PCs), another to sell copy machines, and another to sell college textbooks.
Well, I enjoyed reading and I had some vague notion that maybe one day I would become a writer, so I took the job selling textbooks with a great company, Prentice-Hall, then the leader in that publishing niche.
That was my introduction to the publishing world. I learned how to sell, and my broad liberal studies background allowed me to feel comfortable with professors from all disciplines because I’d be talking organic chemistry in the morning and African-American literature in the afternoon.
A few years later, I started the company mentioned above after going back for an MBA (ok, moms and dads, I know you’ll like that one).
But after years of a flatlining business, we agreed to take some risks and I decided we should expand internationally. That took me to Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. I was able to engage with people from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, often speaking languages I didn’t speak, with a variety of world views. But I was ready! Because of my courses in history and anthropology and world literature (along with meeting fellow students from dozens of different countries), I was able to see things through the eyes of others.
It was my liberal studies background and general knowledge of the publishing industry that took me to England, where we found an international multi-disciplinary publisher who wanted to distribute our products throughout the rest of the world.
They helped us gain business relationships in all sorts of markets we’d never even thought of, and they eventually bought our business.
Without my liberal studies background, I’m sure we’d never have branched out beyond our borders, and I don’t think the company would have grown as it did.
