I was given a book by John Terceman to read, he had reviewed my blog and commented that I should read a book by Stuart Skorman, "Confessions of Serial Entrepreneur", this is a great read and will keeping you smiling all the way through it, well those of us who have been there and done that it will. Stuart is a die hard Entrepreneur, does not take no for an answer and follows his passion and vision, there are some great lessons to be taken from this book and I will share a few over the next few weeks, but I would suggest that you get the book, and have a read, tell me what you think. I have included a short review of his book below and an article on Stuart by Lisa Margonelli, I do not push books much here or in class but would suggest you take a look at the book or at least Google "Stuart".
The book can be found here on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Serial-Entrepreneur-Cant-Starting/dp/0787987328/ref=sr_1_1/026-3440564-6330828?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180420535&sr=8-1
Stuart Skorman, "Confessions of Serial Entrepreneur",
What the Critics Say
"Here is another 'hyper kid' who turned his childhood handicaps and failures into success and happiness as an adult. This book will be an inspiration to all future entrepreneurs and a good read for just about anyone who enjoys a great adventure." (Paul Orfalea, founder, Kinko's, and author of Copy This!)"Stuart Skorman leads the reader on a riveting journey as he chronicles his entrepreneurial career. This book provides valuable insights into the joys and challenges of starting and growing a new business. Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur is the exciting tale of Skorman's passion to enrich his customers' lives and a vital resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders." (Carl Schramm, president and CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation)
Publisher's Summary
Entrepreneur Stuart Skorman, the founder of Elephant Pharmacy, Hungryminds.com, Reel.com, and Empire Video, grew up in a retailing family in Ohio. He worked every kind of job, from cab driver to professional poker player to CEO. In this entertaining, personal account of his coming of age in the business world, Skorman gives an insider's view of what it takes to start a business from the ground up.
Stuart Skorman offers his hard-won lessons in business for any entrepreneur or small businessperson who wants to create a company that has a heart and soul. He reveals what he learned about marketing while working a stint as a rock band manager and bares his soul about his failure during the dot-com bubble. He describes in vivid terms the roller coaster ride of the entrepreneur in good times and bad, and explains how to survive in today's uncertain business environment.
Stuart's Elephant
Successful serial entrepreneur goes for it again
by Lisa Margonelli, special to SF Gate
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
If you were to go to the Elephant Pharmacy on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and get lost in this giant drugstore-gone-crunchy (Suave shampoo beside the Shaman brand, Nature Boy and Nature Girl diapers snuggled next to the Huggies, ear-wax remover, calcium supplements and a panel truck's worth of herbal teas), you might be greeted by Stuart Skorman, a small man in his 50s whose bright eyes dart eagerly under his bushy eyebrows. "IseeyoulookingcanIhelpyoufindsomething?" he'd say. When you answered, he'd lean forward from his waist and speed off. (His head always seems to move faster than his legs.) "Chelated magnesium supplements? Right here. Right here."
Stuart Skorman founded Elephant Pharmacy, and he wants it to do to Walgreen's what Whole Foods did to Safeway. If he succeeds, a chain of Elephants will go marching out across the land, lending its trusted brand name to everything from Vitamin C to health spas to HMOs. In Skorman's wilder dreams, the Elephant brand will be worth several billion in five or 10 years. If it fails, on the other hand, he'll lose more than half his personal fortune -- millions of dollars -- as well as money from investors.
As the founder of three previous businesses -- two of them wildly successful (including Reel.com, an online video-delivery service, which sold for $100 million in 1998), as well as one failure (Hungry Minds, an online learning portal, which wiped out one-third of his savings) -- he knows how this game is played. If Elephant fails, he may never have enough money to play entrepreneur in a big way again.
Who would take such a chance? Who would want the long hours, the acid stomach, the sheer hassle? After all, it's not as if Skorman is a natural-born risk taker in other areas of his life. When he opens a mustard jar in a restaurant, he first covers his hands with his sweater to avoid getting germs on his fingers. The answer may be that Skorman is a devotee of retail capitalism in its purest form. "Business is really clear," he says. "It's a simple relationship: If a customer is happy, you make money." Standard stuff for capitalists, but, following Skorman around his store, you quickly get the sense that he might have reversed the equation a little. He has an almost Pavlovian relationship to the cash register: When it rings, he feels the love.
Interestingly, what does not motivate Skorman, apparently, is acquiring stuff. He does not even own a house, but rents a modest apartment in Noe Valley with his partner. He wears rumpled clothes and drives a station wagon, although he frets because it's a Saab and it has too many extra features. In any case, he quickly adds, his partner drives a 7-year-old car.
Right now, what Skorman wants is a lot of affluent Berkeley Birkenstock-shod customers to come to Elephant. Starting a big-box store -- even if it's a pretty good idea -- is not easy. For one thing, the store has 37,000 products -- and all of them need price tags that meet the competition's. And, for another thing, the building needed expensive seismic upgrades. Then, too, it cost a lot of money to get a pricey CEO from Nike, and she didn't work out. And it turns out that people don't go to the pharmacy as often as you might think, which means they're not buying one of the 50 cool kinds of hand cream on impulse.
Skorman stands between the (tasteful) greeting cards and the one-hour-photo counter and motions like he's waving signal wands to land a plane, "We're holding classes right here," he says. "Ayurvedic, acupuncture, the pharmacist talking about medication for depression, tai chi." Flowers, registered nurses, a bookstore, bone-density measuring machines, natural makeup for aging baby boomers, fiddle music on the sound system. Anything to get them in the door.
Skorman's devotion to customers borders on the obsessive. He slept in the store for two weeks. Last night, when a woman hit her nose on the too-clean plate-glass door, it was Skorman who sat with her as she recovered. "I wish I could do small ideas," says Skorman. "I'm 54 and working 80 hours a week. When you're young, it seems like inspiration, but when you're older, you think it's not healthy."
Money did not always love Stuart Skorman. Until he was 36, he failed at everything he did. He was a taxi driver, a real estate agent, a store stocker, a political-campaign manager and manager of a rock-and-roll band. He tried writing, but he says he didn't have the attention span. "Basically, I couldn't hold a job," he says. "I didn't fit into the culture, and I always wanted to run my boss' business." He spent many years wondering what he was going to do with himself, but in Vermont in the '70s, he was hardly alone: "Those were the hippie years -- you couldn't do business, because it was bad to make money."
But in 1985, Skorman had an unoriginal idea: Start an independent video store for movie buffs. He got together the capital and ran it his way. The store had lots of movies, and the staff was crazy about them -- they even wrote their own reviews. The store was a hit. "Most people moved to Vermont to be poor," he quips. "Turns out I got wealthy there."
His store expanded into a chain, but Skorman felt that his success showed how much the community valued his services. When Vermont was paralyzed by winter snowstorms, the chain ran radio ads telling people the stores wouldn't charge late fees; they could stay home with their overdue videos and remain safe and warm. On Saturday nights, the stores were filled with people. "I was happy to be providing services to the community," he says. "Giving great service inspires me."
But the money and success helped, too. After years of being frustrated and "blocked" because he couldn't express himself, Skorman describes his life before and after the video store as "night and day." As a child, he says, he had a "crazy brain" that hopped around like a bird, focusing for a minute before skittering off to the next thing. Growing up in Akron, Ohio, with dyslexia made success at school out of the question. (Even now, after launching two dot-coms, he's not into e-mail.) So his late bloom brought a redemption of sorts. In being an entrepreneur, he found his calling -- serving customers. "There's nothing freer than an entrepreneur," he says. "I'm a kind of wild man."
Almost. When Skorman's partners wanted to sell the video stores to a national chain, he fretted. He felt loyalty to his employees, who had helped him start the business. He knew they wouldn't want to work for the chain. "I was sad," he says. "Those were my people. But then I went to a psychotherapist, who said I had to live my own life."
And so Skorman sold the stores, stuck three million bucks in his pocket -- more than he'd dreamed of -- packed up his belongings in snowy Vermont and moved to sunny California for a two-year vacation. But relaxing wasn't really that much fun, so he became a high-stakes poker player. "I'm a start-up kind of guy," he says. "It's a high-stakes game with smart people. Poker is like a start-up, but you have no responsibility. With poker, you can take the next day off."
In 1996, he started an online video-delivery service called Reel.com, which offered customers thousands of movie categories and custom reviews. The enterprise didn't make a profit, though it seemed to have potential. In 1998, he sold it to Hollywood Video for $100 million. This time, he didn't need a therapist to tell him to take the money and move on.
His next business was an online education program called Hungry Minds. Skorman describes the venture as a complete failure, though he managed to sell it for $3 million to IDG in 2000. He says the investors took a 100 percent loss, and he himself lost one-third of his wealth, though he paid off creditors and gave employees six months' severance pay. "I deserved it," he says of the failure. "I fell in love with the idea, but it was a bad one."
But he was still fairly rich. So he and his partner, who studies dolphins, headed off to the South Pacific to swim with the dolphins for one and a half years. "We have friends who are dolphins," he says. "We're good at befriending the animals, who don't get to know many people." The dolphins, evidently, were tough customers, but he won them over.
And, in fall 2001, he became obsessed with building a pharmacy that would combine the open feeling of a natural-food store with the comprehensive quantity of a chain. He wanted it to be a place where the pharmacist steps out from behind the counter to talk to customers. Sort of 1950s Akron-meets-New Age Taos-meets-Wal-Mart. Skorman divides the concept into "math" and "heart." "If the math doesn't work, you're out of business," he says. "But if you're not doing good in people's lives, then who cares if you're making money?" The idea was so good, he says, he couldn't stop himself: "Call it passion or insanity -- the rest of your life suffers."
One day last week, Skorman was caught up in the wonder of the start-up. He called his managers to a meeting, telling them, "I've got a whole new revolution. A whole new store design." They don't flinch. Sandy Sickley has been through three start-ups with Skorman. She wears a practical ponytail and a polar-fleece jacket -- as though ready for a blizzard, a heat wave or a shipment of 10,000 unlabeled toothbrushes. "He bit a big bite," she says of Skorman's latest. "I joke that I bit off more than she could chew," interjects Skorman. And so it goes.
Skorman calls the meeting to order, tells a story about his father's dime store in Akron and suggests that the drugstore begin to sell fresh produce. The lieutenants don't blink. "I was waiting for a comma," said one when Skorman was finished with his pitch. They all agree that selling fresh produce at the store will draw people in more often, make the pharmacy more necessary. They begin to strategize -- where should the produce go? (Out the door, of course, so it drags the customers in off the street.) Do they need a permit? A walk-in cooler? Who will be the supplier? Skorman sits back happily, on to the next problem, following his hopping brain.
Back at the pharmacy, the revolution continues. The sales assistant who tends the flowers in the front of the store wears two giant stargazer lilies on top of her head -- like some sort of weird satellite dish for discerning customers' needs. Samples of organic makeup -- which resembles cocoa -- bear a sign reading "Sample. Do not eat!" Underneath the shelves of cough medicines, Skorman has posted a friendly message: "Most coughs will go away on their own." It's strange to stand in a pharmacy that actually discourages you from buying Robitussin. How does Elephant make money without the "math" of cough-syrup sales? It's the store's "heart," Skorman says. "We're not here to sell, we're here to make friends. That's good business."
The book can be found here on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Serial-Entrepreneur-Cant-Starting/dp/0787987328/ref=sr_1_1/026-3440564-6330828?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180420535&sr=8-1
Stuart Skorman, "Confessions of Serial Entrepreneur",
What the Critics Say
"Here is another 'hyper kid' who turned his childhood handicaps and failures into success and happiness as an adult. This book will be an inspiration to all future entrepreneurs and a good read for just about anyone who enjoys a great adventure." (Paul Orfalea, founder, Kinko's, and author of Copy This!)"Stuart Skorman leads the reader on a riveting journey as he chronicles his entrepreneurial career. This book provides valuable insights into the joys and challenges of starting and growing a new business. Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur is the exciting tale of Skorman's passion to enrich his customers' lives and a vital resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders." (Carl Schramm, president and CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation)
Publisher's Summary
Entrepreneur Stuart Skorman, the founder of Elephant Pharmacy, Hungryminds.com, Reel.com, and Empire Video, grew up in a retailing family in Ohio. He worked every kind of job, from cab driver to professional poker player to CEO. In this entertaining, personal account of his coming of age in the business world, Skorman gives an insider's view of what it takes to start a business from the ground up.
Stuart Skorman offers his hard-won lessons in business for any entrepreneur or small businessperson who wants to create a company that has a heart and soul. He reveals what he learned about marketing while working a stint as a rock band manager and bares his soul about his failure during the dot-com bubble. He describes in vivid terms the roller coaster ride of the entrepreneur in good times and bad, and explains how to survive in today's uncertain business environment.
Stuart's Elephant
Successful serial entrepreneur goes for it again
by Lisa Margonelli, special to SF Gate
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
If you were to go to the Elephant Pharmacy on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and get lost in this giant drugstore-gone-crunchy (Suave shampoo beside the Shaman brand, Nature Boy and Nature Girl diapers snuggled next to the Huggies, ear-wax remover, calcium supplements and a panel truck's worth of herbal teas), you might be greeted by Stuart Skorman, a small man in his 50s whose bright eyes dart eagerly under his bushy eyebrows. "IseeyoulookingcanIhelpyoufindsomething?" he'd say. When you answered, he'd lean forward from his waist and speed off. (His head always seems to move faster than his legs.) "Chelated magnesium supplements? Right here. Right here."
Stuart Skorman founded Elephant Pharmacy, and he wants it to do to Walgreen's what Whole Foods did to Safeway. If he succeeds, a chain of Elephants will go marching out across the land, lending its trusted brand name to everything from Vitamin C to health spas to HMOs. In Skorman's wilder dreams, the Elephant brand will be worth several billion in five or 10 years. If it fails, on the other hand, he'll lose more than half his personal fortune -- millions of dollars -- as well as money from investors.
As the founder of three previous businesses -- two of them wildly successful (including Reel.com, an online video-delivery service, which sold for $100 million in 1998), as well as one failure (Hungry Minds, an online learning portal, which wiped out one-third of his savings) -- he knows how this game is played. If Elephant fails, he may never have enough money to play entrepreneur in a big way again.
Who would take such a chance? Who would want the long hours, the acid stomach, the sheer hassle? After all, it's not as if Skorman is a natural-born risk taker in other areas of his life. When he opens a mustard jar in a restaurant, he first covers his hands with his sweater to avoid getting germs on his fingers. The answer may be that Skorman is a devotee of retail capitalism in its purest form. "Business is really clear," he says. "It's a simple relationship: If a customer is happy, you make money." Standard stuff for capitalists, but, following Skorman around his store, you quickly get the sense that he might have reversed the equation a little. He has an almost Pavlovian relationship to the cash register: When it rings, he feels the love.
Interestingly, what does not motivate Skorman, apparently, is acquiring stuff. He does not even own a house, but rents a modest apartment in Noe Valley with his partner. He wears rumpled clothes and drives a station wagon, although he frets because it's a Saab and it has too many extra features. In any case, he quickly adds, his partner drives a 7-year-old car.
Right now, what Skorman wants is a lot of affluent Berkeley Birkenstock-shod customers to come to Elephant. Starting a big-box store -- even if it's a pretty good idea -- is not easy. For one thing, the store has 37,000 products -- and all of them need price tags that meet the competition's. And, for another thing, the building needed expensive seismic upgrades. Then, too, it cost a lot of money to get a pricey CEO from Nike, and she didn't work out. And it turns out that people don't go to the pharmacy as often as you might think, which means they're not buying one of the 50 cool kinds of hand cream on impulse.
Skorman stands between the (tasteful) greeting cards and the one-hour-photo counter and motions like he's waving signal wands to land a plane, "We're holding classes right here," he says. "Ayurvedic, acupuncture, the pharmacist talking about medication for depression, tai chi." Flowers, registered nurses, a bookstore, bone-density measuring machines, natural makeup for aging baby boomers, fiddle music on the sound system. Anything to get them in the door.
Skorman's devotion to customers borders on the obsessive. He slept in the store for two weeks. Last night, when a woman hit her nose on the too-clean plate-glass door, it was Skorman who sat with her as she recovered. "I wish I could do small ideas," says Skorman. "I'm 54 and working 80 hours a week. When you're young, it seems like inspiration, but when you're older, you think it's not healthy."
Money did not always love Stuart Skorman. Until he was 36, he failed at everything he did. He was a taxi driver, a real estate agent, a store stocker, a political-campaign manager and manager of a rock-and-roll band. He tried writing, but he says he didn't have the attention span. "Basically, I couldn't hold a job," he says. "I didn't fit into the culture, and I always wanted to run my boss' business." He spent many years wondering what he was going to do with himself, but in Vermont in the '70s, he was hardly alone: "Those were the hippie years -- you couldn't do business, because it was bad to make money."
But in 1985, Skorman had an unoriginal idea: Start an independent video store for movie buffs. He got together the capital and ran it his way. The store had lots of movies, and the staff was crazy about them -- they even wrote their own reviews. The store was a hit. "Most people moved to Vermont to be poor," he quips. "Turns out I got wealthy there."
His store expanded into a chain, but Skorman felt that his success showed how much the community valued his services. When Vermont was paralyzed by winter snowstorms, the chain ran radio ads telling people the stores wouldn't charge late fees; they could stay home with their overdue videos and remain safe and warm. On Saturday nights, the stores were filled with people. "I was happy to be providing services to the community," he says. "Giving great service inspires me."
But the money and success helped, too. After years of being frustrated and "blocked" because he couldn't express himself, Skorman describes his life before and after the video store as "night and day." As a child, he says, he had a "crazy brain" that hopped around like a bird, focusing for a minute before skittering off to the next thing. Growing up in Akron, Ohio, with dyslexia made success at school out of the question. (Even now, after launching two dot-coms, he's not into e-mail.) So his late bloom brought a redemption of sorts. In being an entrepreneur, he found his calling -- serving customers. "There's nothing freer than an entrepreneur," he says. "I'm a kind of wild man."
Almost. When Skorman's partners wanted to sell the video stores to a national chain, he fretted. He felt loyalty to his employees, who had helped him start the business. He knew they wouldn't want to work for the chain. "I was sad," he says. "Those were my people. But then I went to a psychotherapist, who said I had to live my own life."
And so Skorman sold the stores, stuck three million bucks in his pocket -- more than he'd dreamed of -- packed up his belongings in snowy Vermont and moved to sunny California for a two-year vacation. But relaxing wasn't really that much fun, so he became a high-stakes poker player. "I'm a start-up kind of guy," he says. "It's a high-stakes game with smart people. Poker is like a start-up, but you have no responsibility. With poker, you can take the next day off."
In 1996, he started an online video-delivery service called Reel.com, which offered customers thousands of movie categories and custom reviews. The enterprise didn't make a profit, though it seemed to have potential. In 1998, he sold it to Hollywood Video for $100 million. This time, he didn't need a therapist to tell him to take the money and move on.
His next business was an online education program called Hungry Minds. Skorman describes the venture as a complete failure, though he managed to sell it for $3 million to IDG in 2000. He says the investors took a 100 percent loss, and he himself lost one-third of his wealth, though he paid off creditors and gave employees six months' severance pay. "I deserved it," he says of the failure. "I fell in love with the idea, but it was a bad one."
But he was still fairly rich. So he and his partner, who studies dolphins, headed off to the South Pacific to swim with the dolphins for one and a half years. "We have friends who are dolphins," he says. "We're good at befriending the animals, who don't get to know many people." The dolphins, evidently, were tough customers, but he won them over.
And, in fall 2001, he became obsessed with building a pharmacy that would combine the open feeling of a natural-food store with the comprehensive quantity of a chain. He wanted it to be a place where the pharmacist steps out from behind the counter to talk to customers. Sort of 1950s Akron-meets-New Age Taos-meets-Wal-Mart. Skorman divides the concept into "math" and "heart." "If the math doesn't work, you're out of business," he says. "But if you're not doing good in people's lives, then who cares if you're making money?" The idea was so good, he says, he couldn't stop himself: "Call it passion or insanity -- the rest of your life suffers."
One day last week, Skorman was caught up in the wonder of the start-up. He called his managers to a meeting, telling them, "I've got a whole new revolution. A whole new store design." They don't flinch. Sandy Sickley has been through three start-ups with Skorman. She wears a practical ponytail and a polar-fleece jacket -- as though ready for a blizzard, a heat wave or a shipment of 10,000 unlabeled toothbrushes. "He bit a big bite," she says of Skorman's latest. "I joke that I bit off more than she could chew," interjects Skorman. And so it goes.
Skorman calls the meeting to order, tells a story about his father's dime store in Akron and suggests that the drugstore begin to sell fresh produce. The lieutenants don't blink. "I was waiting for a comma," said one when Skorman was finished with his pitch. They all agree that selling fresh produce at the store will draw people in more often, make the pharmacy more necessary. They begin to strategize -- where should the produce go? (Out the door, of course, so it drags the customers in off the street.) Do they need a permit? A walk-in cooler? Who will be the supplier? Skorman sits back happily, on to the next problem, following his hopping brain.
Back at the pharmacy, the revolution continues. The sales assistant who tends the flowers in the front of the store wears two giant stargazer lilies on top of her head -- like some sort of weird satellite dish for discerning customers' needs. Samples of organic makeup -- which resembles cocoa -- bear a sign reading "Sample. Do not eat!" Underneath the shelves of cough medicines, Skorman has posted a friendly message: "Most coughs will go away on their own." It's strange to stand in a pharmacy that actually discourages you from buying Robitussin. How does Elephant make money without the "math" of cough-syrup sales? It's the store's "heart," Skorman says. "We're not here to sell, we're here to make friends. That's good business."
Slainte
Gordon Whyte
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