Nothing Starts with No, with Bill Rancic (Entrepreneurship, Food and Beverage, Television, Business)
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It's the worst possible business you can get into. It has the highest failure rate. It's like investing in resources. It's just like, this is a way to burn money. Horrible idea, horrible idea. It's okay to fail, but it's never okay not to try. We don't learn much from success. We learn a hell of a lot from failure. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I don't make them twice.
This is The Action Catalyst.
Are you interested in advertising with The Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email at info at theactioncatalyst.com. Bill Rancic is the winner of season one of The Apprentice, a successful entrepreneur many times over, author of four books, and has delivered hundreds of speeches for prestigious clients like Coca-Cola, Capital One, Marriott, Wells Fargo, and others. You can now catch him featured on History Channel's The Mega Brands That Built America. Bill, welcome to the Action Catalyst. Oh, thank you for having me. I have quite an introduction. Bill, you're joining us from Chicago today. You're from Chicago. Your career seems to always keep you around Chicago or take you back to Chicago. For our listeners who've never been there, what's so special about Chicago and why is the pizza better?
Well, I'll answer the first part of the question first, and it's the people. Chicago is a big city that gives you a hug when you come here. The people just are real, they're hardworking, and they're from here. It's generational. And it's like Boston and a lot of these great cities where people take a lot of pride in their city. So the architecture is amazing. The lakefront is incredible. But at the end of the day, it's about the people. And the pizza just is the best. The deep dish pizza, no one makes it better than here in Chicago. I want to talk about your first entrepreneurial venture. I mean, the very first. When did you catch the button? Well, the first business I had was with my grandma and I was 10. I was at my grandma's for the weekend.
My mom and dad were heading out of town and I woke up one morning and my grandma was in the kitchen making breakfast and I was probably like a lot of entrepreneurs out there. I would always ask a million questions. What goes here? Why are you doing that? How does that work? And my grandmother decided she was going to take me in the kitchen and she was going to teach me how to cook. I spent all day making pancakes with her in the kitchen. And then the next day I woke up and I raced into the kitchen and I picked up the phone and I called all the old ladies who lived on my grandmother's block. And I invited them all to come over for a pancake breakfast. And they loved it. And then when they left, they all left $5 bills underneath their plate.
And I said, oh my, I'm onto something here. So then for the next five weeks, I went to my grandmother's every weekend and I kind of had this big shift restaurant experience. Then my mom caught wind of what was going on and she shut the operation down. She claimed I was taking their social security money. So that business ended immediately. That was my first start, to be honest with you. And then from there, I started buying and selling used cars when I was 14. There was an old publication, this was way before the internet, called The Trade and Times. And I was using that to buy used cars and then resell them. And then I had the boat wash and wax business in college. And then When I was right out of college, I took a job briefly for about eight months and I realized that I couldn't work for anyone else. And then I started an online cigar subscription company that we sent cigars to your home every month. We had over 10,000 monthly subscribers getting these boxes sent to their home every single month. It took off.
I started it in a 400 square foot studio apartment and then it quickly grew and grew and it was something.
Sounds like you internalized a lot of these important business principles very early on. I actually started a division of our company where we focus on providing one-on-one coaching to youth. And I currently serve as president of our foundation, Kindness for Kids. And in that foundation, it just reminds me that we actually work with
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