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'Quit Your Day Job Is Garbage Advice' (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article: While Daymond John was building his clothing line FUBU, which would evolve into a $6 billion brand, the entrepreneur was living on the tips he made waiting tables at Red Lobster. "I was working at Red Lobster for five years as a waiter as I was running this business," the Shark Tank star said at the iConic conference in New York City on Wednesday. At first "it was 40 hours at Red Lobster and six hours at FUBU. Then it was 30 hours at Red Lobster and 20 hours at FUBU, because money started to come in." Even after FUBU started to take off, John continued waiting tables. He wouldn't do things any differently if he could, he told the audience on Wednesday: "Don't quit your day job. [...] Let's say I was making an average of $40,000 a year," he continued. "After five years, that's $200,000 of salary. I would have had to sell $1 million more worth of FUBU product to bring home the $200,000, but I didn't have to do that. I just had to sacrifice time."

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Good advice if you work at Red Lobster by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anywhere else... not so much.

    A few points why bringing up a start up at Red Lobster works over basically any other kind of job:
    1. You can pick your hours and change them on a moment's notice.
    2. It's not brain heavy work. You can keep the start up as your primary focus.
    3. You don't have to worry about your employer accusing you of using their resources (and IP) to start a business.

    It actually makes a lot of sense to get a job working at Starbucks/Red Lobster/serving food anywhere when doing a start up to ensure that the rent isn't something you're worried about and you can put that extra focus on the startup.

  2. Re:millennials? by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am not sure what is with this Millennial hate? Is it only because Generation X was just a boring name. I mean Generation X for a short time was the slacker generation, but that stopped fairly quickly. The Baby Boomers in my book are still the worse. Living off the benefits of winning WWII, where they grew up in housing funded by state government, and with state of the art infrastructure, parents who with the GI Bill had college education. All this stuff allowed them to get drugged up during their late teens and early 20's and still get into Dads business as a professional to pick up his business, learning the ropes and having dad retire at an early age. Then to call yourself a success if you didn't drive the company to the ground, and keeping your job well past the age you should retire, not training the newer generation the ropes. Living in a time period of long term economic growth.
    Now they are retiring, and the kids are trying to fill the void, however Boomers will not let them get a foot hold, cutting their salary so they cannot make a living, and then when they say it is unfair, they will just say you kids don't know about hard work.

    For the most part Millennials are very hard workers, they found a way to survive in a period of economic stress, with a hostile to them work force.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. He's right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been part of several failed startups, plus a couple of very successful ones. The ones which failed the most spectacularly were the ones which had very early injections of seed money. The ideas were certainly viable, but the problem was that the investment took the immediate focus off of making money. Of course that was partly the point of the investment, to focus on development, however it was a strategic and grave mistake. In all cases, whenever the investments dried up, the ventures had to go out of business - because there were leases and employees and services to pay for, which could not be sustained.

    The most succesful ones started with nothing but, say, a $1500 line of credit at one distibutor and a corner in somebody's garage. At the very outset, every single transaction made money. They accepted no outside investments. They just kept cycling the profits back into the business, with a very low overhead, fanning the embers until there was so much work to do, they had to hire people to get it done - and before long find bigger space to do it in. One such company, a wholesale distributor which followed the telemarketing model of sales, grew no less than 35% annually for about 10 years before going public via merger. At the time of merger there were about 270 employees.

  4. Re: millennials? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Women are forcing men out of the workforce where men are expected to die homeless and destitute in the gutter. Women wonder why misogyny exists in a population of angry displaced men.