How Robert Herjavec Escaped Poverty to Become a Millionaire 'Shark' | Part 1 | Inc. Magazine

Robert thanks for being here I'm looking forward to this for a couple of days thank you for having a while what a packed crowd yeah amazing and every single one of them an entrepreneur where do you get that what do you know what happen you know what's amazing Eric is I was thinking this morning I came to your conference years and years ago and sat in the audience and listened to some guy probably some big business guy thinking oh my god one day one day that could be me and it's really remarkable how you can achieve anything in life it's also remarkable how long it takes yeah I always thought an overnight success was literally overnight and I don't want to tell you how many years ago i sat in the audience and thought oh one day I'll have a big company and isn't that the great thing about business you know when you're doing a million a year you think I could get to five million one day if I could get to five million I spoke at a conference a couple weeks ago and the biggest business in the room was 2 million and I asked them what how do you define big what's your dream and they were like oh five million if I could get to five million in sales and then you get to five million and you think 10 million if I can get to 10 million and that's what I love about businesses it never stops I mean our company this year will do close to 150 million and we're really proud of that and big pat on the back but on a global scale with the people we compete with we're insignificant so we're like 250 how do we get to 250 let's go yeah but the CEOs are those other companies don't get invited to Dancing with the Stars that's true you know I always tell my customers you know it's interesting Tony talked about a brand and I find that as I talk to a lot of businesses the ones on the smaller end of the spectrum are worse at marketing and tend to be worse at sales large to small or more successful than not people that tend to be on this on the spectrum aren't as sales or marketing driven and I'm generalizing but they tend to believe that the world will be two paths to their door you know they tend to be the kind of people that say as long as I build something great people will find me from my experience I've learned that you know there's no such thing as genius in the darkness of the basement the world does not be a path to your door there really is no such thing as a better mousetrap unless you're telling a customer you have a better mousetrap I mean you've gone so far let's start at the very beginning because it's such a great story you have such a great story I'll open it by asking about the creation legend of Robert Herjavec and start with one word should be egg so Eric you know the the village I was raised in is called B egg which is a Croatian word which at this is how nice a place it was it actually is the Croatian word for flee because it was a small village that during the wars people would only come to if they were fleeing somewhere else you know it's it's an entire melodramatic story I'm not I'm actually not a first generation immigrant I actually came to Canada on a boat when I was 8 years old and the boat was called to make it even more hollywoodian melodramatic the boat was called Christopher Oh Columbo you know in the whole nine yards my dad was in jail multiple times and last time he got thrown in he was told if he ever comes back he's never coming back and then he grabbed my mom and I we crossed the border Italy one suitcase landed on a dock and my mom remembered she had a friend and we took the train from Halifax to Toronto lived in their basement for 18 months and you know here we are and so one of the things you know people always say oh you're the nice shark and you're nice on the show now we say well you know it's relative because the other guys are such jerks at times right but I am a nice guy until somebody starts complaining to me about how hard they have it and I have to tell you nothing pisses me off more than people that complain or people that have this feeling the life owes them something and I kind of really learned that from my dad I mean my dad was this really proud guy and he would say that he was a political prisoner he wasn't he was just a young guy who liked to drink and he would go to a bar in a communist country drink a little too much and say screw communism and they throw him in jail and you know the normal person would would kind of make that connection oh if I stand up in a bar and say screw communism and go to jail this isn't a good thing my dad took it the other way he was like I'll show them and so the next time he stood up he said even worse things about communism fundamentally he was a really proud guy and he hated the idea of building equity or building capital and having to share it with somebody who wasn't working as hard as he was you know the thing I learned for my dad is he was okay with having nothing he was okay with working really hard he was okay with getting knocked down in life but he wasn't okay if he created something that was successful that somebody would take it away from him and that's what he hated about communism and what I took out of all that is you know when we came to Canada just to get a job he had to work in a factory and he swept floors and and the whole nine yards and I'll never forget one time because it was really hard for me I grew up in this little village but my grandmother raised me and I always liked to talk and so I didn't have to work hard on the farm there was pigs and donkeys it was you know it was pretty good as a small kid and then I come to North America and I got thrown into a classroom I don't speak the language I look funny we're very poor I never realized we were poor until I got here I come home one day and I'm crying because the kids beat me up and they were mean to me and I'm like oh my gosh nobody loves me why I don't have any friends my life sucks and I'm sitting there complaining to my mom and my dad walks through the door and he's kind of listening and he had literally just walked two miles from the bus stop after having worked two shifts in the factory and he's listening to this when I'm done complaining he looks at me and he says you know life doesn't owe you anything never complain all you own is an opportunity and in this country you have an opportunity and then he went to sleep so he could wake up the next day and work two more shifts pretty amazing so you know when you have when you have that as your compass it's really hard to complain there are days like everybody in this room there are days where I see overbearing difficulty there are days where I see more no than I see yes there are days where I see harder things than see opportunities but it doesn't last that long you know it's not about eliminating that stuff out of your life it's working through it and and keeping going because it's really true this is still the best country in the world to start a business there is so much opportunity in the world today especially with the internet especially with the pace of change especially with cloud computing yes that's right and this is a period in which entrepreneurship is a golden profession to have it get a lot of support it's the best job in the world to have and you know because of shows like Shark Tank it's kind of become cool to be an entrepreneur which is crazy when you think about I mean look at the five of us you couldn't have five weirder looking people and in general people think we're kind of cool I mean it's it just goes to show you how being an entrepreneur is is really in the American psyche today take me through the transition from you know a lonely Croatian kid finding his way in Canada to the head of the verge of a group where'd you get the idea for it and how did you get started you know Eric there's we have this argument on the show all the time when I first started doing the show and mark came on I really didn't get along mark is very Cuban is very pushy mark is about mark and I don't mean that in a mean way but he's very aggressive and he's all in your face all the time a few years later you know I really like him and he's a great guy but he's different than I am I'm really not that pushy and so we have this argument where he he has this famous story when he was 12 years old he was selling mustard packets to kids and you know and he knew he was going to be a billionaire when he got older you know when I was 12 years old all I didn't know I wanted to be a billionaire I don't want to be a millionaire I didn't know anything I just didn't want to be poor

Channel: Inc.

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Keywords: Inc. (Magazine), Inc.com, Robert Herjavec (TV Personality), Dancing With The Stars (Recurring Competition), Shark Tank (TV Program), Florida (US State), Conference, Inc. 5000 Conference, robert herjavec story, robert herjavec documentary, robert herjavec interview, herjavec, robert herjavec life story, rob herjavec, robert herjavec success story, robert herjavec motivation, robert herjavic, millionaire documentary, from poor to millionaire, robert herjavec how did you get so rich

Id: u5uD62Plakg

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2015