Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015, when Kevin O’Leary was chairman of O’Leary Funds; the roles and business positions it describes reflect that time and may have changed since.
Kevin O’Leary is currently chairman of O’Leary Funds and a self-made multimillionaire. He comes from a poor family, and his business adventures are well worth hearing about.
His parents divorced when he was a child, and since his mother earned very little as a seamstress, Kevin had to work after school to help with the household income.
He eventually made it to university and earned an MBA from the Ivey Business School.
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Straight after graduating, Kevin and two friends he had met at university decided to start their first business, a television production company. It was never very successful, but they managed to sell it for $75,000, which left them with $25,000 each.
He used that money to start his second business in his basement. The company was SoftKey Software Products, and this one did take off quickly. He even had to hire a few employees to cope with the growth spurts the business was going through.
A major investor promised to put $250,000 into the company, but walked away at the last minute. There were no other investors available, so without any financial backing he would not be able to meet payroll and would be forced to close.
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“How could I have left our company in such a vulnerable position? In high finance, things change in a second,” Kevin explains. “But I’ve never been caught out like that again.”
“If I could cover payroll for a couple of months, I would be able to get the company back on its feet. I knew how to do it. So, in my desperation, I called the only person who could lend me some money: my mother.
My mother wrote me a cheque for $10,000, practically all her savings. It wasn’t much for me, but it allowed us to stay in business for another six months.
$10,000 is nothing when it comes to running a business, but it forced me to make vital decisions about what was worth keeping in the business and what wasn’t, and above all, to focus on what was productive so I could stretch those $10,000 as far as possible.
Thanks to those $10,000, I was able to save the company and later sell it for $4.2 billion.”
For those who don’t know SoftKey, the company that bought it was Mattel, and that purchase is held up in business schools as one of the most disastrous acquisitions in history.
Sources: Wikipedia and Business Insider.
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Featured image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-0508-014 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
