Creativity

There are a lot of nervous people currently out there in the marketplace looking at how the public stock exchange is doing. What a lot of people are unaware of is that no matter what the market looks like there are entrepreneurs that are actively involved who will creatively make a deal out of nothing regardless of the outcome. There’s a saying that holds true for entrepreneurs and that is paraphrasing “What is one mans garbage is another mans fortune.” A prime example of what I’m talking about is Mr. Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico who is currently the richest man in the world. It was the early 1980s and Mexico was in the depths of a massive financial crisis. Mexico defaulted on foreign-debt payments, investors fled Mexico, and companies traded for centavos on the peso. Slim was able to scoop up assets on the cheap. All the while, he was schooling his heirs on his investments, occasionally even seeking their counsel to test their business savvy-such as the time he asked 12-year-old Patrick if he should acquire cigarette maker Cigatam (he did). “You make it fun,” Slim says. “It is one thing to listen to a father lecture. It is better to learn from experience.” Another example of Slim’s business acumen is when he took advantage of the dot-com crash in 2000 to scoop up phone assets that had gone belly-up, including AT&T Latin America, which provided him with a backbone in the telecommunications field for moving traffic throughout the region. This fits hand-in-glove with Mr. Helu’s overall plans of expansion for his telecommunications company into the rest of Latin America. Carlos is just one example of how creativity and the ability to see deals where others see failure can make millions out of less than a dollar.