David Kord Murray - Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others

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Table of Contents

For
Nancy Kord. Nancy Murray. Mom. And Nanny.

BORROWING BRILLIANCE

THE SIX STEPS TO BUSINESS INNOVATION BY BUILDING ON THE IDEAS OF OTHERS

Step One: Defining

Define the problem youre trying to solve.

Step Two: Borrowing

Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem.

Step Three: Combining

Connect and combine these borrowed ideas.

Step Four: Incubating

Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution.

Step Five: Judging

Identify the strength and weakness of the solution.

Step Six: Enhancing

Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

PROLOGUE

A LONG, STRANGE TRIP

I lit out from Reno,
I was trailed by twenty hounds.

JERRY GARCIA

Fifty million dollars.

Thats the amount written at the bottom of the contract; the amount a bank is offering to pay for my start-up company; and the amount that would slip through my hands, never seeing the light of my personal bank account. They say that you learn from your mistakes. Well, if thats true, then Ive purchased fifty million dollars worth of insight. Not everyone can say that they have lost so much, so fast, and so magnificently. Unfortunately, this is a true story. Its the story of the search for a creative idea, about its origins, how to construct it, and how it evolves. So, heres what I bought for my fifty million, what I learned from this search: Ideas are constructed out of other ideas, there are no truly original thoughts, you cant make something out of nothing, you have to make it out of something else. Its the law of cerebral physics. Ideas are born of other ideas, built on and out of the ideas that came before. Thats why I say that brilliance is borrowed.

Always is. Always was. And always will be.

Go figure, right?

As I surveyed the fifty-million-dollar pot on the table, I struggled to compose myself. I didnt want to show my cards, for this was the most important negotiation of my life. It was enough to make a first-round draft pick squirm and so it was difficult to concentrate, as I tried to bluff, tried to close the deal and win the pot. I felt a bead of perspiration form on my brow and hoped he wouldnt notice.

Thats it? I asked. My hands were damp with tension and I hid them under the table.

Screw you, Dave, he said.

He was a young guy for a bank president, in his mid-forties, seemed sincere and like someone I could trust. I countered his fifty million with sixty million because I thought thats what youre supposed to do. He laughed. Fifty million was a lot for this start-up and we both knew it. It was twice the offer GE Capital had put on the table a few days earlier. My company, Preferred Capital Corporation, had no debt, since Id financed it out of my personal savings and its operational cash flow, so most of the fifty million would go right into my pocket. Not bad for a middle-class kid from Massachusetts.

We signed a letter of intent for the fifty million that day. It would be followed by a month of due diligence, the bank auditing Preferreds income statement and balance sheet, followed by the formal transfer of assets and liabilities and a check with lots of zeros in return. It was the fall of 1999 and I was looking forward to a new year, a new century, a new millennium, and a new beginning. There was no need to fear the audit, since I oversaw the preparation of the books myself. It was all just a formality.

I had founded Preferred Capital four years earlier as a finance company that provided loans and leases to other companies that used them to acquire equipment like computers, copiers, furniture, and so on. Preferred would negotiate a contract with the customer, send an invoice to the equipment vendor, and then sell the contract to a bank or GE Capital once the equipment had been installed. For the first few months I was the only employee: president, marketing manager, lead salesman, financial analyst, and receptionist. I had one desk and two phones. I had no intention of creating one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States, I only wanted to be my own boss, make my own decisions, and implement my own ideas. My primary concern was lifestyle, not income or equity or the double-digit growth of my start-up. I didnt want to be part of the rat race, so I moved to Lake Tahoe and started Preferred Capital on the shores of what I considered the most beautiful place in the world.

A hundred years earlier, Mark Twain had explored the same shores and said it was the fairest view that the earth afforded. Like Twain, I saw the lake on my first cross-country trip from east to west. I couldnt believe such a place existed, and the moment I first saw it, I wanted to make it my home. Composed of deep greens and blues, its the perfect combination of forests, mountains, and crystal clear water that reflects the cobalt skies above it. The bluer the sky is, the bluer the lake is, and in the High Sierra blue is very blue. For the next twenty years I told family and friends, Someday Im going to live in Tahoe. Someday. So when I established Preferred, a company with a business model that relied on direct mail and telemarketing, one that could function anywhere, I realized I could kill two birds with one stone. I could be my own boss and, at the same time, live within the blue world of the Tahoe Basin. One stone. Two birds. One day became someday and my dream became reality.

However, the company grew faster and bigger than Id ever imagined. Starting with only fifty thousand dollars, Preferred Capital exploded to over three hundred employees, half a dozen offices, and over twenty million dollars in revenues. Every quarter Preferred grew by 100 percent; financing the growth out of the profits from the previous quarter. I became an expert in expansionhiring, training, marketingand crafting the systems to control it. I was in the middle of a moneymaking storm, cash flowing in, around, and out of my company. I became a multimillionaire. It was exciting and I got lost in the hurricane of excitement. It wasnt about the Tahoe lifestyle anymore; it was about being bigger, brasher, and bolder than the next guy. I bought a five-thousand-square-foot oceanfront home perched on a bluff in San Clemente, California, and another one in Crystal Bay, Nevada, perched above the shores of Lake Tahoe. I outfitted each home with Porsches, Range Rovers, and state-of-the-art electronics and gadgets. Sure, I was winning the rat race, but as Lily Tomlin pointed out, I was still a rat.

Then one day as I sat and listened to one of my employees, a pretty young girl in a short skirt, complain to me about the lack of professionalism of another pretty young girl in an even shorter skirt, my mind began to wander and I wondered what it was all about. I wondered what had happened to the dream. I had turned into a bureaucrat trying to negotiate skirt lengths to keep everyone happy. Thats it, I thought, time to get out. I was an entrepreneur, an idea guy, not a manager, and Preferred had grown to the point that it needed management, not a new idea. Let someone else worry about skirt lengths. It was time to sell it, quit the rat race, and get back to the original plan, to the calmer waters of living among the deep greens and blues. I had had enough. It was the late nineties and the Internet bubble was causing a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. Companies with little or no revenue were selling for outrageous amounts of money. Preferred Capital, on the other hand, had a proven business model and had generated millions in revenues and profits from self-funded growth. It was a very desirable acquisition, and thats why the bank was offering me fifty million.

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