OUTWORK AND GRIND! | Brutally Honest Business Advice from Mark Cuban

Whatever industry you pick, if you outwork everybody, if you try to be a little smarter than everybody, if you try to be a better salesperson than everybody, if you try to be better prepared than everybody, you've got your best chance because if you don't do it and somebody else does, I have the saying, work like someone's trying to take it all away from you. I actually work like someone's spending 24 hours, working 24 hours to take it all away from you, man. That's kind of the way I look at it. What would you say is the number one reason why people fail? Lack of brains, lack of effort. Yeah, they just, they don't do the work. They don't learn, you know. When you walk in the room, when you start a business and you start to talk about somebody, you're never in a vacuum with no competition, you know, unless you're just extremely lucky. And if there's going to be competition, that means somebody else knows your business as well as you do when you get started. And if you walk into a competitive environment and they still know more about the business than you do and more about your customers, you're going to lose. But most people don't consider that. They don't do the work. They don't learn more about their industry. They don't know even about their business. I mean, and so you've got to put in the effort to know more about your industry than anybody else. And that's the brains part. And that's the effort part as well. Because look, if you're competing with me, you better know what you're doing. Otherwise, I'm going to kick your ass, you know, and you're not going to outwork me. And so, you know, the combination is usually what kills businesses early on more than anything. You could, within a five, 10 minute interview, say this dude's not going to make it as an entrepreneur. Yeah, I mean, I can, I can typically tell, right? I can tell, um, but by, um, their passion, I can tell by their focus. I can tell by their preparation, you know, there, there's a whole realm of things in any business here. You know, here's, here's the business you're in and here's a thousand things that influence whether or not you're going to be successful, you know, through my experience in businesses, I can put myself in his position and say, okay, here are 900 of the thousand things that he has to be aware of and then go through and ask. And by how many of those are her, um, issues they've been able to address already, that kind of gives me a sense of how hard they're willing to work, you know, and I can tell by the questions they ask me. So all I have to do is say, okay, what do you want to know? And you know, when they start saying, what should I do? They ask you, yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. Right. And I want them to ask questions, but you know, people like to say, you know, the only stupid questions are the one you don't, once you don't ask, and that's not right, right? Because the questions you ask, tell me, tell whoever more about you than anything else you do, because in particular tells me about your preparation. If you ask me questions about just basic things that you should have known and you should have down to a science, that's going to disqualify you almost more than anything. If you're not always learning to this minute, if I'm not continuously learning, if I'm not just absorbing as much as I can absorb, someone else is going to kick my ass. Right? So you're talking about paranoia. The greatest source of your paranoia should be knowledge. If someone else knows more than you do, and if you're not learning, if you don't know the law, if you don't know how to learn, if you don't have a thirst for learning and acquiring information, you're, you're SOL. Do you think there needs to be a healthy level of paranoia? Oh, absolutely. There needs to be. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always say, you know, for every one of my businesses, I said, what would I do to kick my own ass? You're right. So whatever business you have, there's somebody trying to put you out of business. There's somebody trying to take a bite out of your business and it's better for you to figure out how they're going to do it rather than they do it. And so, yeah, that's being paranoid. And so you have to be paranoid. You have to anticipate other people's next moves and you can't ever downplay the competition. I was at a business plan competition this morning for at a college and they were kind of being dismissive of the competition. And so you can't ever do that. You know, they're out there trying to take you down and they're not just going to sit still. And if you're good, really, really good, you're going to inspire them to work even harder, faster, better. And so you have to be, you know, very self-aware of what you're good at and what other people are good at. And, you know, a healthy dose of paranoia makes a big difference, I mean, is very helpful. Let's transition to a different subject with college. You went to IU, right? Now you've got a lot of people that say, forget about school, you know, drop out of school. They're idiots. So you think they're idiots. Tell me why. If you're going to have and run a business, if you don't understand accounting, you're already behind the eight ball. Can't you hire a guy that knows how to run an account? But then they still have to communicate to you. Your accountant might tell you you're profitable, but your cash is going down, you know, not understanding the breakdown. And when you don't. Do you think you need college to learn that? Yeah, I think you do. Right. Because it may not for some people. Look, if you're so self-motivated that you can take an online course in accounting and teach yourself everything, you're way ahead of the game anyways. But most people aren't. I don't care if you go to a community college and take accounting and spend ninety nine bucks for the class, just, you know, spending the money forces you to be more obligated to do it. But accounting, finance, lesser extent marketing, sales at the school office, that these are all that's the language of business. And so while it's possible to teach yourself these things and while it's possible to hire them, when you're starting your own company, you don't want to have to spend money hiring an accountant. Well, let me take that. If you've gone through all these classes, I don't have to hire a lawyer to incorporate. Right. You probably figure out yourself. And so your cost of opening up a business drops. But even more important than all that, that's that's the blocking and tackling. That's the language of business. You know, the thing I learned at Indiana that was more important than anything else. I learned how to learn. And learning became far more important to me because the one certainty in business is that it's always going to be changing. How does one entrepreneur increase the speed in areas that they can increase? There's certain things you can't control in one way. Speed of growing your business. All right. So how fast can I grow? Yeah. I mean, it just depends. You've got to know your own skill set. Right. And you've got to know how that fits within your company's life cycle. You know, some companies are slow, slow grind. And you just have to understand that. And you've just got to bide your time until it starts to click and then grow with it quickly. You know, if you're trying to release a product that needs to be ubiquitous, you've got to go as fast as you can and then, you know, release a product. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of people will say, you know, perfection is the enemy of profitability. Right. And that doesn't mean you have to wait till it's a perfect product. It really just depends on what the product is that, you know, a barbershop, right? Is it an app? Is it a service? Is it a product? But you know, the key is looking for the low hanging fruit. What are the what are what customers are willing to write you a check or commit to it? You know, so that they're willing to integrate it into their daily lives or integrate it into their daily business. And so getting a commitment either through time or revenue is typically what I look for. And so if I can get a commitment, then I'm going to be able to learn. I'm going to see how they use it. Do they sustain usage? And then once I get the next one, you know, hopefully it came a little bit faster than the first one that I can ask for referrals and then the next one, then the next one. And I just try to ramp it up. You know, when I bought the Mavs, we had no season ticket holder base. And so literally it was a matter of just putting a list of former season ticket holders and a white pages back then, you know, on my desk next to my phone and making phone calls. You? Yeah, me. Yeah. Because if I'm not going to do it, how can I expect someone else to do it? Right. So just get on the phone. Hey, this is Mark Cuban. I'm the new owner of the Dallas Mavericks. You know, I'd like to invite you back. It's not though. This is my business. You can't get regular sales gets or something. Make those calls. Once they get to a quarter, you're a guy that's a billion, you're making those. But that's all. You know, that's fine and good. Right. Because everybody's got their own goals. Right. And but still, I don't want anybody at the Mavs to be able to say, well, he's not willing to do the work. Right. There's, you know, if I walk around, I'm picking up all the papers. I'm not saying go get that picked up. I'm like, OK, that's trash. I'm picking it up. So but in terms of speed of growth, it's really you got to get that first customer first. And then when you get that first, what did you learn? Reiterate, get that next customer. And then hopefully as you learn more and more through the process and the next one, the next one becomes come by faster. Now, alluding to earlier about entrepreneurs being born or built, you know, and I think they're I knew I was wired to be excited about business. How or why? I don't know. But, you know, and there's certain guys that have the genetics to jump out of the gym. Right. Certain guys, you know, that, you know, when they golf, they have the muscle memory and the discipline, you know, Dirk. The whiskey may not be the most talented guy in the NBA, but his discipline and his focus to do what's necessary to be successful, he's willing to do and combine it with being seven feet tall and being skilled. You know, it makes him an amazing basketball player. So it's understanding what your skill set is, finding the right place to use those skills and then going for it. You know, will that make you 250 grand? It depends if you pick the right industry. You know, I started my first business when I was 12. I was buying and selling baseball cards, buying and selling stamps, anything I could do to make money. I was hustling and trying to do so. I was into business, but not so much where it was. All my friends were into it with me, so they wouldn't know. Baseball cards. Yeah. Baseball cards, you name it. I mean, I grew up in Pittsburgh. And so I would probably even less than 12 years old, I would go up, buy a bunch of baseball cards that I collected and I would package. I would say, OK, you're guaranteed to have a Pittsburgh Pirate in this package. And I would charge three times as much. And I'd set up on this park bench down in the park down in Scott Township where I grew up. And I'd have these little sales and it was great. I made money. And I mean, it was, you know, I learned as much about business.