Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty

By Harvey Mackay

Holiday Inn founder, Kemmons Wilson’s advice is to “work half-days, every day. And it doesn’t matter which half… the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours.”  Working half-days didn’t make Wilson the motel maven of the world overnight. Wilson turned Holiday Inn into a franchising marvel, before selling the business in 1990.

Mackay says “Wilson’s life is a super value-pack of lessons for entrepreneurs”:

• Learn your talents early. Wilson’s father died when he was just a baby. He worked like the dickens from his earliest days- selling popcorn, jerking sodas, you name it. He had a talent for hard work and ambition. His career shows him matching these talents to a parade of opportunities.
• Build on skills. Hawking jukeboxes honed Wilson’s house-selling skills. In the home business, he learned construction and real estate. (He became an ace at site selection.) The home skills made him a natural for the hotel trade. Hotels gave him a vehicle for franchising. Step after step- each one bigger… and each anchored in the past.
• Don’t get mad… get busy! The trigger in Wilson’s career was getting hopping mad on a family trip to D.C. How many times have you hit the roof about something you know you could do better? In some of those cases, you probably could.
• Don’t expect the “experts” to buy your bright new ideas. Wilson tried to market his Holiday Inn vision to builders across the country. They were stuck in the mud of their own real estate. Few of them saw how interstates would overhaul auto travel. Wilson ended up selling his franchises to Memphis doctors and lawyers.  Then Wilson had the foresight to put in a training system. That gave the growing chain quality control.
• Merchandise your value. An obituary in The Economist quotes Wilson as saying: “You can cater to rich people, and I’ll take the rest. The good Lord made more of them.”