PART I: 300 YEARS OF TERROR, TREASURE, & TEARS
Each entrepreneur can only do business in their time. History is a fascinating spectrum of starting and building businesses; it’s one of my favorite things to read about. I write business bios for young readers and love sharing the stories of eventually successful people who almost always started rough. Milton Hershey couldn’t make candy, for example. He did not let that stop him.
In spite of many, many disastrous times to begin a business, surely the competitive era of pirates to the left, pirates to the right, was one of them. I think no business book is boring. How We Did It is my favorite podcast, Shark Tank my favorite television show, and I learn something from any quality documentary on entrepreneurs from artists to zoo-builders. Each venture usually seemed impossible. But at my company— Gallopade International—we say the impossible is really the only thing we’re good at.
Like business owners in the past, today, and certainly in the future, Blackbeard gallivanted ahead to the task at hand, took no prisoners (well, maybe), sailed on undaunted, tacked as needed (and it’s always needed), learned on the fly, and pressed on.
Like us, he had competition! But at least ours do not (usually) have a pistol or cannon aimed at our heads.
Things always change. I can’t believe the change I’ve seen in the once-staid book publishing industry over the last fifty years. Change caught up with Blackbeard, too. But in the meantime, despite obstacles, treachery, and more, Blackbeard made a fortune. So have I. So can you. Hey, the wise take their advice where they can find it.
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LESSONS
If you really want to be a successful businessperson, you don’t have to be a pirate, but you should be fairly fearless. Entrepreneurship is not for sissies. It’s ok to quake in your boots when you go before the Shark Tank team or the lending person at your local bank. It’s ok to be young and new and ask questions. And, trust me, it’s admirable to be able to show all you have done to-date to prove that you are invested in your idea, meaning you’ve spent personal funds to achieve your early goals.
You must have confidence in your idea, even when no one else does. You can have a plan, but you must realize that you will deviate from it many times. There’s always danger ahead. You are stuck with the times as they are. Being too early is just as problematic as being too late.
But waiting is death. At some point, you must plunge into the waters and make your way along shifting shoals until you get your feet on more solid ground. Not to be a party-pooper, but that’s generally when something or someone will pull the early rug of success out from under your boots. So what? That’s just part of it.
Only you can set your course and go full steam ahead. I’d say Ned Teach was born to be Blackbeard.
Who were you born to be?...
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CAROLE’S COMMENTS
Read about business to learn about business. Serious business books are helpful, but candid stories of how people started and grew their companies are even more informative. My kids grew up in my business. Later my daughter went to business school. She spent half the class time, she said, raising her hand to insist, “That’s not how it works in the real world!”
My parents insisted I’d be a starving writer. College, business, authorship, fame, financial success, making a difference—none of that was on their radar for me. It takes a lot of fortitude to press on despite a constant barrage of discouragement. But almost any bad experience can build perseverance, stubbornness, grit, gumption, and fortitude to do what you have in mind to do, even without all the age, experience, knowledge, skills, or money you might eventually need.
Look at me: I started what would end up as a multi-million- dollar educational publishing company as a young mother with two small children, a kitchen table, typewriter, rotary telephone, and no money. But I had an idea.
Look at Milton: He failed at candy-making but excelled at putting one-and-one together and figuring out that bitter cocoa + milk might be quite tasty.
TRICK QUESTION:
Was Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, ever discovered?
ANSWER:
Yes, in 1996 off the coast of North Carolina. At least 30 cannons and 250,000 artifacts have been recovered so far.
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Ahoy!
Let’s start at the beginning. Except that, honestly, I can’t imagine Blackbeard the baby. He was born in Bristol, England,
perhaps, according to historians, around 1680. It is believed that he was born into a respectable, well-to-do family. This may explain why, later, he seemed just as comfortable dealing with governors as with low-level scallywags.
Surely as a boy, he loved the sea, for the sea surrounded him. Likely, he overheard many dramatic stories of sea voyages. Possibly, he tuned into tales of legitimate success at foreign trade across seas. But could anything have been more enticing to a young boy than the adventures of the likes of Sir Francis Drake and his Golden Hind and the riches it brought back to England? Or the venture of the Duke and Duchess, ships that sailed out in 1708 and returned to home port in 1711 with thousands upon thousands of pounds of goods of all kinds.
If the real world of the sea was not enticing enough, how about the story of Robinson Crusoe, based on an actual buccaneer, intentionally marooned on a deserted island for four years? If you could be a banker behind a desk, or a buccaneer before the mast—which would you choose?
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LESSONS
Where and how you begin your entrepreneurial path is important. It does not need to be any place special and it does not have to be glamorous. The most impressive businessman I ever met started out selling newspapers on a street corner. Each week he hopped aboard a trolley and rode miles out of town to a tuberculosis sanitarium where his mother lived. He gave her his earnings, then returned to work again for another week. He was three years old! After this humble beginning, what do you think could have kept him from working his way from rags to riches? Absolutely nothing! Never apologize for humble beginnings.
What did a young mom with two young scallywags but no college degree bring to the table, besides breakfast? Oh, a lot! Running a household alone is like running a small business. You wear many hats, juggle them all, and gain confidence and skills that translate perfectly well to the work world.
It is likely that Ned Teach brought his intelligence, early sailing experience, and participation in Queen Anne’s War (where he was said to have “distinguished himself for uncommon boldness and personal courage”) to bear when he chose not the family business, but the business of what would become piracy.
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CAROLE’S COMMENTS
All this fun about Blackbeard aside, it really is important to self- translate your skills into bullet point items of interests, experiences, skills, and abilities. Nothing is easy about starting and running a business, much less scaling and building it to long-term success. Get your head on straight! Believe in yourself.
When I went to my first bank for a loan, my feet did not even reach the floor. But my head said I could do this, deserved it, and could prove it. I did.
If you can’t come up with any bullet points, then go work someplace where you can gain experience and know-how. And don’t pooh-pooh ANY experience. If you started working at age 16 (like I did as a long-distance operator) that automatically tells folks you can do something. A resume of where you went to school is not the same as saying what you have actually done. When people come to us with smarts but no skills, I always say, “We are NOT a teaching hospital,” and encourage them to get a job in journalism to prove their writing and hustling chops.
It’s not as important for others to know what you have done or can do, as it is for you to know and trust your skills, seek help where you need to beef up skills, and take advantage that people are always willing to help someone who really wants to learn!
A short-cut I found to learning real skills was to get temp jobs and keep them just long enough to learn things I would need to know, such as photography, printing, and more. That, plus a lot of reading (no YouTube tutorials back then!), as well as local community classes on accounting and such, really sped me down the path toward entrepreneurial stability and sustainability. Remember, you don’t just want to start, you want to finish.
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Never forget, Steve, Bill, and Bill, those savvy dudes who dropped out of college and went to their garages to start their companies! I imagine Blackbeard spent his first 10,000 hours as a kid and teen learning to tie knots and other nautical essentials?
TRICK QUESTION:
The Golden Age of Piracy is over, right?
ANSWER:
Piracy has always been around and always will be. Today we struggle with piracy of everything from books to pocketbooks. It remains to be seen if AI has a piratical sense of humor?
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What Golden Age are you starting your business in?
Aloft!
Blackbeard peered out upon the high seas and took the lay of the land. What caught his eye was the West Indies. This was
ground zero of privateering, more truthfully and technically known as outright piracy.
New Providence Island was base camp for some of the most infamous pirates of the day. Here, pirates were the CEOs and the law. You could say Ned Teach set out to be the Chairman of the Board. The newbie pirate proceeded to train under the master Captain Benjamin Hornigold.
It’s difficult to say what gave Blackbeard his apparent blood lust. But right away, Captain Hornigold determined that the young Ned had a marksman’s eye, a propensity for dirty infighting, and a thirst for blood. In addition, he was a prodigious drinker —even mixing gunpowder with his rum and setting the concoction on fire before guzzling it down!
Maybe he was just showing off for an entranced audience?
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LESSONS
No worries: Your resume need not match Blackbeard’s, but look at what he did that you can too:
• Determine Step One: That was to get in the right place at the right time. These days, you may need to do the same. Like Blackbeard, the world is a global stage, and you want to be where the action is. Yes, much can be done over the Internet, via email and text, but there’s nothing like “being in the room where it happens,” as Alexander Hamilton might have said. The world is also always moving. Once, Hollywood was HOLLYWOOD (crooked sign on the mountain and all), while today, due to costs and other California issues, the largest sound stage in the world is in middle Georgia, aka to many, Hollywood East.
• Find a mentor; become someone’s protégé: It seems Blackbeard picked the perfect pirate king to train under. Not only did Hornigold teach him the ropes, he gave him a sloop equipped with six cannons and a complement of seventy men. If you show your desire to learn and your mettle, there’s often no telling what someone will do for an eager young entrepreneur. That was a lot of start-up stuff for Blackbeard, who soon put it to good use.
• Set up shop: There’s no time like the present! Blackbeard soon established his own headquarters atop a hill with a watchtower. While keeping an eye out, he saw to immediate duties such as planning, trading booty, and interviewing potential employees for his next foray.
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CAROLE’S COMMENTS
Your best Step One is often the cheapest option available to you. Many one-person start-ups make the mistake of renting an expensive office, hiring a secretary, and all that traditional stuff once essential to show you were open for business. I was happy to be poor enough that my only option was to work on my kitchen table. I had a manual typewriter, reams of yellow paper (called foolscap, how appropriate), rolls of ribbons, and a gross of that icky white-out stuff. The only other things I needed were time (lots of that with no job), a dictionary (my well-thumbed one from high school), and a pulsing imagination. Best of all, I was already there when my kids came home from school each day. I felt I had my priorities straight.
There is no way to say how much I appreciated all my mentors. If you are young, sincere, and just ask, almost anyone will be thrilled to explain how to do X or why they do Y.
Businesspeople love to share their start-up stories. If successful, they are proud of what they have accomplished and candid about the pitfalls they encountered. They can also become customers!
I “set up shop” in my home and called on potential book buyers who couldn’t care less if I had an office. In fact, what they really liked was that I often had a kid in tow when doing my sales calls. Real people like real people. Be yourself.
TRICK QUESTION:
Who was Blackbeard’s right-hand man?
ANSWER:
Israel Hands. When Blackbeard shouted, “ALL HANDS ON DECK!” he came running.
