How this entrepreneur went from homeless to billionaire

shockedcanadian

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Aug 6, 2012
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This is why the American Spirit of entrepreneurship, hard work and application of talent cannot be replaced with Communism. You can be born poor in America but become as successful as you want if you have what it takes.

http://nypost.com/2017/06/23/how-this-entrepreneur-went-from-homeless-to-billionaire/

John Paul DeJoria made his first sale at 7 years old. The budding entrepreneur and his brother were in foster care at the time and spent afternoons at the Variety Boys Clubā€™s wood shop in East Los Angeles.

ā€œThe man [in charge] said, ā€˜Hey guys, hereā€™s a design for a wooden planter. Itā€™ll be 25 cents worth of wood, but if you want to build them, Iā€™ll give you that 25 cents on credit,ā€™ ā€ DeJoria, now 73, tells The Post. So he took on his first investor. He went from door to door for two days, ultimately selling the planter to a waitress for 50 cents ā€” enough to pay back his supervisor and buy the wood for a second planter.

His career took off from there. At 9, he sold Christmas cards to neighbors. After high school, he hawked Collierā€™s Encyclopedias while living out of his car.

So in 1980, when the sole investor backed out of the haircare company he and celebrity hair stylist Paul Mitchell were moments away from launching, he knew what to do. The two men pooled their available cash ā€” $700 between them ā€” and started heading from salon to salon to sell their shampoos and conditioners before their first bills arrived.

The rest is history, as relayed in the new documentary ā€œGood Fortune,ā€ now showing at Village East Cinema. Today, Paul Mitchell pulls in $750 million in sales annually, between products sold in salons and the hundred-plus Paul Mitchell Schools locations around the world. DeJoria, now worth an estimated $3.1 billion, went on to co-found PatrĆ³n Spirits and a handful of other companies and philanthropic organizations.

Heā€™s come a long way from where he started. DeJoria was raised by a single mom in LAā€™s then-dangerous Echo Park and spent five years in a foster home when she couldnā€™t afford to care for him. Most of his neighbors were immigrants or members of biker gangs.

ā€œWe didnā€™t know we didnā€™t have anything, because we didnā€™t have the TVs to know what everyone else had,ā€ DeJoria says. ā€œBut we had at least two changes of clothes, so we thought we grew up OK.ā€
 
Well, good for him but very few people ever get lucky like this. Don't judge all people based on the few.

Of course not. It's not about guarantees it's about the opportunity. You don't have to be a billionaire to be successful either, but you have to have the shot at success.
 

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