Robert Herjavec - You Don’t Have to Be a Shark: Creating Your Own Success

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For Brendan, Skye, and Caprice

May joy and laughter fill your days.

I love you with all my heart.

And for Kym,

who danced into my life to fill it with love,

warmth, and hope.

I love you.

There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.

BEVERLY SILLS, 19292007

The most common career advice American children hear from their parents is You can be anything you want to be, inevitably followed by, if you try hard enough.

Dont take it literally. Nobody should. Eventually we all encounter limits on our dreams. One of the most popular sayings used on Shark Tank is A goal without a timeline is just a dream. Some limits are imposed on us by physical qualities. Example: never tell a sumo wrestler he can become a jockey. Others are situational, or as simple as geography; its difficult to become a world-class skier unless you live near snow. And some are self-imposed, when we dont try hard enough to make our dreams come true.

The path we all follow toward success, no matter how we define it, is never as easy as Just try hard enough. It never was. Things are not and have never been that simple. Yet one of the biggest obstacles we all encounter in this journey is easily defined and, despite all we may believe, something we can all learn to handle.

Its selling. Selling your services or product. Selling your dreams to others. And even selling yourself to yourself, which for some people can be the hardest job of all.

You believe you can be anything you want to be? Good luck. But win or lose at that game, the skill you need more than any other is understanding the basics of selling, and appreciating all the ways you will benefit from it.

All through life.

* * *

No matter what you want to achieve or who you want to become, the ability to sell anythingincluding yourselfis one of the most rewarding talents to acquire in life. Why? Because it is universal. It is difficult to imagine any aspect of life that would not benefit from knowing and practicing the skills of making a sale.

Its easy to see the importance of sales either when standing behind a retail counter or pitching a billion-dollar sale of aircraft to the Pentagon. But its more than that. Sales jobs are pervasive in almost every kind of work you can name. You cannot be an effective CEO if you cant sell your company not just to customers and shareholders but to your staff as wellthose you currently employ and those you hope to employ. Its also hard to be a great engineer if you cant sell your project to investors for funding. And trust meits impossible to make a successful pitch to the Sharks if you cant first sell yourself to us.

Selling is not just an essential part of business; its also essential in personal relationships, all the way back to teenage years. You need to sell yourself on a date, and sell your parents on the idea of giving you the keys to the car. Eventually you are selling your abilities as an employee when you have your first job interviewand every job interview after that.

So selling is the basis of any relationship, personal and business. Dont believe me? Watch any episode of Shark Tank and think about the sales job that is happeningor too often not happening. When someone who hopes to persuade us to hand them $100,000 cant come up with the information we need on sales figures or market size or competitive situation, its a deal-breaker in most situations. Many of them get slammed for not being prepared, no matter how promising their idea may be. In other cases, however, we Sharks may actually help them along, suggesting the things we need to know, trying to move toward a deal.

Whats the difference? Why do we knock some and encourage others?

The difference is sales ability. The ones whose failings we overlook engaged us immediately in their business concept, and their promise that we will make money from it. The others did not. So we look for ways to work with those who succeed in selling us and to get the others out of the studio ASAP.

Sales are the beginning of everything that business strives to achieve. Not the endthe beginning. This makes it far more critical to a successful career than many people recognize. Its also been suggested that the world consists of natural-born salespeople and everyone elsethat good sales ability is as genetic as the color of your hair. Which is a bunch of nonsense, and I can prove it.

Much of my success in business is the result of selling gifted people on the idea of investing their future with me and my company, and selling prospective clients on the benefits they will enjoy by giving us their business. Does this mean I was a natural-born salesman? No, it does not. I was not a unicorn, either; both are equally fictitious.

I learned to become good at sales. So can you. And the first step is to get over your fear of failure and rejections.

Which brings me to dancing.

* * *

By age fifty, I had achieved many things in life that I could not have dreamed of as a youngster. I had built a number of companies from little more than an idea into major success stories and restructured a Silicon Valley firm to avoid bankruptcy. I was expanding my current technology-based business into a worldwide entity. Along the way I also managed to run marathons, write two bestselling books, become certified as a scuba diver, play in celebrity golf tournaments, and race million-dollar cars around racetracks at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour, winning my share of first-place trophies.

But I had never danced. Never even gave it a thought.

Oh, I had shuffled around a floor a few times with a partner, but it wasnt really dancing. I didnt know the difference between a cha-cha and a Chihuahua, and the idea of wearing an eye-catching costume while performing a waltz or a tango was as alien to me as singing with the Metropolitan Opera. I could strap myself in a Ferrari and dive off the Great Barrier Reef, but if someone suggested I learn to dance at the professional level on live television in front of fifteen million viewers, I would have waited for the punch line. They couldnt be serious. Me learn to dance? In costume? On live network TV?

Actually, the idea appealed to me. Who wouldnt want to glide across the floor with a partner, making smooth moves to the music and looking great? The truth is, I was deathly afraid. I actually danced with my daughter at her graduation ceremonies, a father-and-daughter dance. I lumbered across the floor trying to look cool and keep from tripping over my feet. When the music ended I could hardly wait to get off the floor and sit with the other fathers who had been as frightened as me at dancing in public.

So when the producers of Dancing with the Stars invited me to participate in season 20 of the show, what did I do? I agreed. Immediately. Actually, I thought they were joking. I figured somewhere along the way they would come to their senses, and I would get the call telling me they had changed their mind. With nothing to lose I said, Sure, why not? But the call never came, and when I realized they were serious about it, I grew petrified. Yet, for a number of reasons, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I realized if I could sell the idea of me as a dancer first to myself, then to my professional partner and the judges, and finally to the viewers watching every step I took, it would be in many ways the ultimate sales job. And I needed that kind of achievement at the time.