Last week I was strolling through the aisles of my local public library and stumbled upon a book titled “Rules for Renegades” by Christine Comaford-Lynch. I had never heard of her before I saw the book, but with a title like that I had to check it out. I haven’t even finished the book yet but I love it. I’ve just gotten to the point where she sleeps with Bill Gates. Does that have you a little more interested?
Christine has accomplished quite a bit so far in life. She ran away from home at 16 to become a model in New York City. Six months later she talked her way into college without a high school diploma. She didn’t care for either fashion runways or college so she became a Bhuddist monk. At 24 she broke her vows. At the age of 25 she got a job with Microsoft despite the lack of a college degree. At 27 she decided to become a millionaire. Ten years later she had made over $10 million and consulted to 700 companies in the Fortune 1000. And she retired at 40. I’d say all that qualifies her to write the rules for renegades. What do you think?
Remember, she doesn’t even have a high school diploma proving once again that formal education is over-rated. She says an MBA is optional, but a GSD is essential. GSD stands for “gets stuff done.”
She started her first company on the spur of the moment while she was a contractor at Microsoft. Something happened such that Microsoft could no longer pay them directly so 300 contractors were called into a big meeting to announce the change and encourage the contractors to become employees of Volt Technical Services who would then pay the contractors (forgive me if the details are not exactly correct but that’s the basic idea…it had something to do with taxes).
Of course Volt takes a percentage off the top of all the contractor’s wages and makes a killing. Quickly doing the math (as Christine did), if Volt makes $10/hour for each contractor, they make $3,000/hour (300 contractors x $10/hour) which is $24,000/day assuming an 8 hour day and $120,000/week. And all they really have to do is handle the payroll & tax withholding. How hard can that be? Not much work for $120,000 per week.
Christine realized this, recognized an opportunity, and more importantly quickly acted upon it. She stood up in the middle of the meeting and announced she had a company providing the same service and would take a smaller percentage of the contractor’s earnings than Volt.
She had no idea how she was going to accomplish any of this, but she would figure it out as she went along. After the meeting she passed out her email address, made a phone call to register a corporation, rented office space, and outsourced the payroll to another company. By the end of the next day she had 35 employees. Her plan was to take 5% less than Volt. So if she made $9.50/hour for 35 contractors that’s a bit less than $350/hour, $2,800/day, $14,000/week, and $900,000/year. She created a business on pace to gross nearly $1 million/year in little more than 24 hours. Not bad. Sounds like a classic reptile brain.
That little excerpt is from the first 10 pages of the book. There’s plenty more and like I said I haven’t even finished the book yet. I recommend you read it. You’re bound to get some good ideas.
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