B Quadrant Values “I’m looking for the best people to join my team.” For people in the B quadrant, the core value is wealth-building. People who start from nothing and build great B quadrant businesses are often people with powerful life missions, who value a great team and efficient teamwork and want to serve and work with as many people as possible.
The Problem
Building a business is the way most of the very rich became rich. Bill Gates built Microsoft; Michael Dell created Dell Computers in his dormitory room. Still, historically, there have been very, very few people who have truly lived in the B quadrant. The B quadrant is the best place to begin generating genuine wealth, but at the same, there are some barriers to entry that have kept most people out.
For one thing, most people don’t have the cash it takes to start their own business. Today it costs an average of $5 million to start your own business. And for another thing, building your own business from scratch remains the riskiest of all ways to become rich. The failure rate for new businesses is about 90 percent in the first five years—and if your new venture fails, guess who just lost $5 million? In my early years of starting businesses, I failed twice, and while it never pushed me into bankruptcy (and I never got any government bailouts!), it did cost me millions of dollars.
Typically when you start your own business, you have to make sure your rent, utilities, and the rest of your overhead are paid, your employees are paid, and your suppliers are paid, or you’re out of business. So guess who doesn’t get paid? You. In the course of starting a new business—and I’m talking here about a successful business—you can easily go five to ten years without taking a paycheck.
Remember Kim and me, sleeping in our beat-up Toyota? It wasn’t fun. We could have taken jobs that would have immediately put a roof over our heads, but as miserable as it was (and believe me, it was), we chose homelessness over employment because we believed in our dream of being business owners and living in the B quadrant.
Most people do not have the mental, emotional, physical, or financial stamina to handle these conditions. It can be brutal, and usually is.
