Jack Ma and Michael Dell need no introduction. Their stories of resourcefulness border on legend. And these uncertain economic times will probably require a little more resourcefulness from all of us.
Jack Ma was born into a very poor family. So poor in fact, they could only afford to eat one chicken a year. But having enough money isn’t necessarily the problem. You need to be able to deal with adversity.
After Nixon visited China in 1972, Jack’s home city was one of the first to open up to the West. They began experiencing an influx of American tourists. Jack would befriend those visitors and ended up learning English by being a free tour guide. He learned about Western culture this way and began to start thinking differently.
Michael Dell got a job with his hometown newspaper selling subscriptions at the age of 16. He noticed people who signed up had two things in common, they were either getting married or moving to a new residence. It turns out marriage licenses where public information in Texas; including the address the license was sent to.
Michael’s resourcefulness kicked in to high gear when he decided to create his own version of the ‘Baker Street Boys’ by hiring his friends and having them go to the surrounding counties and collect the addresses of everyone who’d applied for a marriage license. He then sent out a direct mail pitching a free trial subscription.
During one high school summer Michael had sold enough subscriptions to make $18,000, which was more than the annual salary of his history and economics teacher.
Takeaway:
Rather than focus on what you don’t have, look around and find where you can gain leverage through resourcefulness. Be like Jack. Be like Mike. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs should aspire to find ingenious ways of solving problems without having to throw a lot of money at them.