Nobody’s Apprentice
By Fran Harris, Ph.D.
It’s an age-old question. Are entrepreneurs born or made? Ask Dr. Randal Pinkett, winner of NBC’s and Donald Trump’s hit reality show “The Apprentice,” and the answer is as clear as a bell. “Both. I think there are innate qualities that some people are born with that make them more suited to entrepreneurship but I also believe that entrepreneurship can be nurtured, without a doubt.”
Sage advice coming from a guy whose first foray into the world of business was a lemonade stand when he was around eight or nine. “I honestly don’t know what prompted me to do it. I just grabbed my mother’s Country Time lemonade mix, her pitcher, and her cups. I guess in that instance I didn’t have any costs because I used all of her stuff.”
Lesson #1: Leverage OPM. Other people’s money is the best way to launch a business. “Absolutely,” Pinkett laughs. “Risk is great but if it doesn’t have to all fall on your shoulders, why not?” This technique proved to work well for Pinkett who went directly from lemonade to office supplies. Still using none of his own money. “Back when I was in school there were these folders called Trapper Keepers. They were these fancy notebooks with lots of different filing arrangements. I used to manufacture these miniature size Trapper Keepers using some discarded cardstock from my mother’s job,” said Pinkett. A gifted mathematician and technology geek, Pinkett attended computer summer camps, learning as much as he could, knowing unconsciously or not that these skills would come in handy down the line.
Some entrepreneurs are drawn to the excitement, the potential financial freedom offered through business ownership. Not Pinkett. It was the adventure that turned him on. “I just liked the idea of offering a good or a service. I remember setting up the equivalent of a flea market in my mother’s backyard with all of the toys that I was no longer using. I would sell them to the other kids. I put tags on them. The whole nine,” he said. Then Pinkett, a veritable one-man wrecking crew would go out into the streets and launch his grassroots advertising campaign. “I’d announce the sale and the kids would come running.” This proved profitable until the suits caught on to the game and ordered him to cease and desist. “My mother figured out what I was doing and she shut me down,” he laughs. “She wanted me to give my toys to my younger nieces and nephews rather than selling them to the kids for a profit.”
Unlike many successful CEOs, Pinkett says there were no other entrepreneurs in his family. “My grandfather was a postal worker. My grandmother didn’t work, she was just a stay-at-home mother. My father, worked for corporations and my mother worked as an administrative assistant for most of the years I was growing up.”
Despite having no direct business owner models in his immediate family, Pinkett’s entrepreneurial flame continued to flicker. It was in college actually when a very close friend, Wayne Abbott, made a proposal. “He was two years older than I. His family and my family were one of the very few black families in our neighborhood.”
Abbott headed to Rutgers University two years prior to Pinkett’s arrival.
It was during his senior year and Pinkett’s sophomore year that Abbott decided to start his own company designing and selling t-shirts. Pinkett caught a glimpse of Abbott’s operation at an orientation fair for new students “I did a double take. I was like ‘Wayne, what the hell are you doing?’ I was completely floored.” That moment proved to be pivotal. “That’s when the light bulb went off for me. I thought, ‘If Wayne can do it, why can’t I do it?’”
Over the next two years Pinkett and Abbott added two more partners, Dallas and Larry. The Fantastic Four got busy. And in the summer before their senior year they developed the blueprint for Mine, Body & Soul Enterprises. They sold compact discs out of their “main office,” also known as their living room. “Then we had an educational services division that would take the profits from the CD sales and do outreach to minority and inner city youth. I was the president and CEO overseeing the operation at the age of 20.”
Life was golden. Sales were good and there was nowhere to go but up. Then another lightbulb came on. “I was out doing a lecture at a high school and a young lady in the audience went home and told her mother about the speech that I gave and she said it was really good. Her mother happened to be the coordinator of a conference for a large non-profit organization in New York. She actually called me and said, “I’m looking for someone to organize a conference, a training conference for students.” In little or no time, Pinkett and his partners grew that business to six figures.
They operated their training and development company from 1994 until 2000 and enjoyed a very good run. Then two critical events changed the tide. In the fall of 2000 the stock market took a downturn. And on September 11, 2001, terror struck the United States. “9/11 was the death of our education and training company. All of the remaining major accounts that we had except one, and we had some heavy hitters -- called us to tell us they were going to cancel their events for 2001 and 2002.” Pinkett had high hopes for their consulting firm but quickly acknowledged that an unpredictable marketplace is what a lot of entrepreneurs endure.
“To go from high fiving and chest bumping with your business partners to not knowing what was going to happen with our business was very frustrating,” said Pinkett. “I’d won awards and gotten tons of accolades and to look around at that time, you wouldn’t have known I’d achieved a certain level of success. I was disappointed and sad.”
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