How to Take YOUR Business from Good to GREAT | Ask Mr. Wonderful #4 Kevin O'Leary

Chris Brown decided, "I've got a love album the same exact day that mine come out," because you could do.

"I hate it when guys do this! Really?"

"Hey, Mr. Wonderful here and this is another episode of Ask Mr. Wonderful. Now what I like about this is no-holds-barred. You ask me any question you want and I give you the answers you ask. I answer. Now bring them on!"

"Mr. Wonderful, right now I'm a college student and I've been getting a lot of money through scholarships. I was wondering what's the best way to start investing or making money out of that money. Like, I won't be making like a hundred grand but I'll be making around five, ten grand coming through coming out of college. So I was wondering, you know, medicine stocks. I was looking into account commodities. What's a good way to start making money and saving up? Or should I just say, 'Thank you, Dad'?"

"Fantastic question! Great time to be considering it. You should save 10 percent of what you're gonna make. If you're making five thousand, five hundred dollars, invest it in a basket of stocks like an ETF. There are so many conservative ETFs out there. I like dividend-paying conservative ETFs. I'm not going to recommend a ticker, but the concept of just using a single ETF that maybe has 20, 30, 50 stocks in it is the best way to do it. Then consistently maintain putting into this every month or two months whenever you can the 10% of your salary by. If you do that and even only have an average salary of 52 thousand dollars and you do it until you're 65, you'll end up with a couple of million dollars in the bank. That's the greatest strategy! The fact that you're thinking about it is fantastic. Good luck to you! I'd stay focused on saving and investing. Stocks are terrific over a long period of time. Yes, there is volatility, but you'll be buying some when the stocks go down, you'll be buying some as they go up. Over the long period of time, you're gonna make six or seven percent. That's what the market has provided over the last 50 years."

"Mr. Wonderful, thank you so much for your willingness to take this question. Really do appreciate that. My name is Ron and I own a media company, which is essentially websites, and business is pretty good. Things are going pretty well, but looking back at your history, my question is what is it that you feel, if you could point to one particular thing that you did with SoftKey Software Solutions? What is it that you did to bring it from pretty good to great? What is it that made that company, you know, a 7 out of 10 to a 10 out of 10 that increased your profits, increased your size? I'm trying to figure out how to go to that next level even though I'm doing pretty well."

"Ron, that's a great question! How do you get to the next level? You hire amazing people and you give them a piece of the upside. Very hard to do in a services business like yours, but not impossible. Scale is everything! You want to get bigger. The only way you're gonna do that is expand beyond being just a one-man show, and that's tough. Finding the right partners that should augment your skills. You know, if you're great at one thing like sales and marketing, get someone who's better in logistics or hiring people that can actually do more of these websites. I've always found in every one of my deals that maybe money, it's the team. I built a fantastic team of people working together towards a single mission. The better the people, the more money I made. It's that simple! But I always gave up some to them so they were part of the story, and I always found even if I gave up half, which I did in the case of The Learning Company, that outcome was four point two billion dollars. So I was pretty happy with the outcome. In the long run, it's all about team! It's really hard to do it on your own and building a team. You have to build it slowly and find the right partners and then give them some of the upside."

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"Hello, Mr. Wonderful! Hope all is wonderful with you. Here is my question. I find that my biggest weakness in my life is I'm too emotional about everything. So I ask you, in your life growing up, did you find yourself in situations where you got angry or you got mad or you didn't agree with somebody when you knew that you were right? And how do you deal with your emotions? I'm curious to know."

"Richard, what a fantastic question! You're absolutely right: your emotions can be your best friend but also your worst enemy. Because when you make irrational decisions that are based on sheer emotion, you're often making the wrong decision. And yet emotions are part of your intuitive gut feel. You have to understand them! I find the best way to do it is don't be impulsive. I get pissed off too, I get angry, I get elation, I get all of those things too. But what I've learned over time is not to make decisions under the influence of any of those emotions. Just delay the decision until you can be rational. Maybe sleep on it, get up in the morning, have a coffee and think about it. And if you're not comfortable yet, don't make the decision. There's always the option to do nothing for a while. The only way you're going to learn that's to experience all the decisions I made under heavy duress or emotional stress have cost me a fortune. Big mistakes! Also, you know, revenge is a stupid emotion. It makes you do stupid things! Be rational about it. It doesn't mean you can't, you know, be pragmatic, but being motivated by hatred or fear or anything like that is never a good outcome. You know, life happens. You gotta deal with it, but you have to do it rationally and pragmatically. Don't get caught up in emotion. Simply wait it out."

"Hello and thanks for your time, Jeff Wonderful. I only have a minute in my ingredients list. It's a bit ugly so I will just jump in and hope you can spin this into a meal. As a person who invests in purchases and sells businesses from the other side of the table that I am on, I am curious as to know how you would handle this if you were starting all over again. I created an electronic device and complementary desktop software, the mobile app to follow, and finding interested parties to fund the first production run has been difficult. I have gotten a few offers where they mostly offered me little money and wanted to make me an employee of my own creation. One person in this group offered me a generous deal but as laid-back as they are about money, they do have a record and say and do pretty questionable things. Would you take the money from a questionable and publicly unpredictable person and pay me back whenever, tip with a flat one-time fee in no window, take substantially less from a respected business person who was trying to lowball you just so you can get off the ground? Or you just keep waiting and hope you don't run ashore?"

"Anthony, fantastic options! I would go with the person I respected that was low-balling you. I would try and move them up a little bit. What you need is to get this thing off the ground to prove it out. I mean, you know, having a little bit of something that works versus nothing of something that never got off the ground, those are obvious decisions! You want to work with somebody you respect and you trust, not somebody who thinks a slime ball. Let's face it, it's not worth it! Life's too short. Go with the person that's low-balling and you ask for a little bit more, but get the deal done. I mean get something going. That's what being an entrepreneur is all about! You never get what you want. I don't get what I want. You have to compromise, but the do-nothing in this case is a bad decision, because you won't get anything in that case. Good luck!"

"Hey, Mr. Wonderful! I was wanting to clarify what is the best way for millennials to be able to pay off their student loans. If you could verify this, I would really appreciate it. Thank you for your time! Have a great day!"

"John, the best way for millennials to pay off their student loans is to get myopically focused on it! Even while you're in school, get a job slinging beer or waiting tables. That's what I did! I hate student debt! I hate being in debt! Everything in my power was to take as much as my part-time jobs, even after I got out of college, and pay back any loans I had. I owed money all over the place! You're not free until you get out of debt and you can't save anything while you're paying back interest. Often, people buy a lot of crap they don't need. So rule number one is don't buy crap you don't need! Fifteen pairs of jeans? You need two! You don't need 20 pairs of shoes! You need two! You need a good suit, you need a tie. Sometimes you're gonna need that, but don't buy a bunch of crap you don't need. Take it and put every dime you can towards that! Suit alone you can pay it off in about 36 months if you're really focused, assuming you have a job. You don't get a full-time job as a part-time. Try and make 20% of what you earn off against that loan! Those loans are nasty! Interest rates go up over time and you eat up so much of your potential by paying interest to somebody else. Pay it off."

"Hey, Mr. Wonderful! It's Mrs. Fabulous and I have a question that only you can answer. Okay, for a Rolex, currently the case back isn't clear where you can see the movement. Do you think it would be tacky in any way to switch that case back to a clear sapphire glass so you can actually see the movement?"

"Mrs. Fabulous, you've come to the right place! I'm glad you asked me this question. You cannot touch that Rolex! You cannot modify it! You can't drill it! You can't put diamonds in it! A Rolex has a protocol in terms of its value in the market and you know, I'm wearing one right now. Let's have a look at the back. This is a very valuable Rolex, very hard to get. I mean, this is an extraordinary. You know, the thing is you can't mess with the back. I have changed the bracelet to red; everybody knows I do that, but I have the original bracelet, in its case and all the papers. To get a GMT like this, you might wait a year or two years! I don't know! But the point is, if you were to change this back, you would be tampering with the integrity and the essence of the watch, its soul. Effectively, now people do this, but they trash the value of the watch. It's something else I want to tell you. When you get a collectible watch like this—and most Rolexes are—and you take it in for a cleaning where they do on an official basis remove the back, clean it, make sure it's all functioning, ask them to make sure they do not polish the watch! Never touch the patina, the scratches of the watch! Never touch it at all because that is part of the soul of the watch as well. When they polish it to make it shiny again, they are removing several microns of metal, which is just a faux pas, a huge mistake! So if you're understanding the value of a Rolex and its collectability over the lifetime you have it, do not mess with it! Do not take the back off! Do not replace it! Live with it exactly the way it is! This watch has gone up in value dramatically since I bought it and I'm not messing with it. I would never polish it! Boy, it looks good on me! These red bands look spectacular on me!"

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