Giovanni The Margarita King

I was reading the story of Giovanni The Margarita King from the book Starting from Scratch. He’s a man who grew up in Colombia and studied architecture while in school. When Giovanni’s mentor told him that continuing to pursue a career in architecture because there was no future in it, he decided to move to the U.S. and open a restaurant. He started working in San Francisco as a busboy and worked his way up to restaurant manager. He decided to open his first Mexican restaurant, Las Margaritas, and saw that it went really well for him. In 15 years, Giovanni built, opened, and sold 9 restaurants with his famous margaritas being a great factor for his success. He earned the name “The Margarita King” and was the named “Best Margarita” in San Francisco for 7 years in a row before he was forced to retire and become a judge. From there, Giovanni decided to sell his famous margaritas in stores. It took several years of networking and establishing connections, but he finally put together his perfect margarita and decided it was time to find a distributor. Giovanni tried to get a deal with Southern Wine and Spirits, but he was immediately turned down; when he tried to convince a regional distributor, they told him that they believed his price was too high and that if could convince 30 local stores to sell his margaritas, he would get a deal. Giovanni set out to sell his product in local stores and within eight months, he had 750 accounts. He went back to the distributors and is now selling different flavors and sizes in multiple countries around the world.

There are many differences in the experiences between Giovanni and the entrepreneur that I’ve observed are that both entrepreneurs have different backgrounds. Giovanni grew up in Colombia where his dad was part of the oil business there and came to the U.S. in search of a better future. My interviewee was born and raised here in the U.S. and his father was in the military, which led him to have a different life and backgrounds.

Interview with an Entrepreneur

I met with an entrepreneur today and I interviewed him and asked what had led him to become an entrepreneur and to share his story with me.

 

He told me that his interest in becoming an entrepreneur started because his father was a patent attorney and would meet them for lunch on the weekends, which led to him meeting a lot of people who owned their own business.

Another reason he was interested in becoming an entrepreneur is that the town where he lived had wealthy people on one side and non-wealthy people on the other, so he went to school with kids that came from wealthy families. He also saw that a lot of people in the wealthy side of town had great ideas for starting a business but, had no idea on how to start.

The last reason he told me that he decided to become an entrepreneur was because he doesn’t like being told what to do and that he enjoys leading or being the leader of a team.

He told me his story about his life during college, how he joined the military, how he went back to school, working for Wall Street investment firm, and then how he started his own businesses.

 

After hearing his story, I asked him what advice he had for me and other young people that wanted to be entrepreneurs. He gave me a lot of advice that I decided to put down as a list:

• There’s not a way for one person to know all that he/she will need to know about starting a business, so a team will be key to success.
• You won’t be able to start off right away.
• You must gain job experience before starting your own business.
• Before you can start a business, you need to know you can sell your product.
• When starting a business, find a business that can grow.
• Hire the right people.
• Learn to have goals and know how to measure them.
• It’s important to recognize your strengths and weaknesses.
• Don’t skip any steps. To have a solid foundation for your business, you must take things one step at a time
• Have an end goal to know whether you have succeeded or not.
• Realize that your surroundings change and that they can have an effect on your business.
• You must continually learn from you business.
• Numbers don’t lie, so be sure pay attention to the information around you.
• Be sure to realize when your business is in trouble.
• Don’t forget to balance the time you spend with your business and your personal life

 

When I started talking to him, I was expecting at most a 20 or 30 minute conversation. Our conversation didn’t seem to take very long, but he had to cut himself short because he had a meeting to go to. I looked at the time and realized that we had been there for a little over an hour. I learned a lot from what he told me and I hope that this blog will be of some help to those who are also planning to be entrepreneurs, like myself, in the future.

Three Entrepreneurs

Today, I’ll be telling you about three entrepreneurs that are very similar and yet, are different at the same time. Their names are Elon Musk, Sir Richard Branson, and James Garland. They are very similar in that all three men became who they are now by being risk takers and being successful at it.

Elon Musk took the necessary risks that lead to his success when he decided to leave South Africa and chose to move to Canada. Once he was there, he went to college and later started the first online directory called Zip2.com. He sold the website for $307 million dollars at the age of 28. Next, he created X.com, later PayPal, to make transactions online, but he had a competitor and sold to Ebay for 1.2 billion dollars. He is now the CEO of Tesla Motors, CEO/CTO of SpaceX Technologies, and the Chairman of SolarCity.

Sir Richard Branson took the necessary risks that lead to his success by going on dangerous expeditions to gain promote his brand and his product line. He started at the age of 15 when he decided to start a national student newspaper called Student. Four years later he began to sell records by mail order and then opened his first record store. In 1972, he started Virgin Recording Studio and a year later he launched Virgin Records. He’s sold many products and services under the Virgin label, such as: airline service, mobile phone service, health club chain, commercial space flight, and many others. He has attempted many record setting balloon travels to promote the Virgin Group which have helped in his success.

James Garland took the risks necessary to be successful by starting a small boat cleaning business. He started in 1990 when he started Barnacle Jim’s Boat Service. He then moved to car detail and now he is President/CEO of Sharp Details, an airplane cleaning service.

 

These three men are different because they all have different backgrounds.

Jim Garland graduated from Radford University with a degree in Economics and his idea to start his boat cleaning company came to him when he was with some friend at the bar.

Elon Musk’s father is an engineer and his mother is an author, nutritionist and model. His mother was a Canadian citizen and his father was a South African citizen. He moved to Canada because he didn’t want to serve for the South African army.

Sir Richard Branson’s father was a lawyer. Branson also has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. He attempted to start his business at 13 by growing and selling Christmas trees.

These three men are all successful in their own way; they are similar in that all three are risk takers, but their histories are different. I hope that this information has helped you learn something new.