I recently had the good fortune to attend an event where one of my favorite entrepreneurs and fellow Indiana University alumni, Mark Cuban, was the guest speaker. The talk was put on by Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Austin and was titled “Rocking Entrepreneurship”. I’ve followed Mark since I was a freshman at Indiana University where he is one of our most successful alumni and jumped at the chance to hear him speak. If you’re not aware of how made his fortune, he and another Hoosier alumni started a company called AudioNet in order to be able to listen to IU basketball games outside Indiana. They later renamed the company Broadcast.com and sold it to Yahoo! for 6 Billion dollars. I only wish my love for IU Basketball could some day pay those kinds of dividends!
I was feeling a little out of place as I drove my rental car to the event just outside downtown Austin as every car in the parking lot was a Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Tesla, or Audi. As it turns out, most of the audience had already made their millions through their previous or current ventures. During the question and answer session they asked questions like “All of us here are raising kids in an affluent family, what can I do to make sure my kids don’t grow up spoilt?” So I was slightly out of place but I’m a first time entrepreneur and was just excited to see Mark.
So what did I learn? Well my number one takeaway was this:
“There’s a 12 year old out there somewhere ready to kick your ass.” – Mark Cuban
The point was there will always be competition who are potentially younger or smarter but hopefully not more ambitious. “You control your effort.” was another reminder that you can work harder than the next guy. When you’re a newer Austin SEO and you start to hit a wall, remember there’s someone out there trying to beat you and so you better keep working. I’m not sure I can commit to not taking a vacation in the first seven years of Neon Ambition like Mark said he did while he was building up MicroSolutions, but I’ve got my head down. And I can assure you there isn’t an SEO company in Texas more ambitious than us.
“Treat customers like they own you. Because they do.” – Mark Cuban
If you’ve got no customers, you’ve got no money. Pretty simple right? My business model and the SEO engineers I’ve hired are all part of Neon Ambition’s plan to keep our customers as happy as possible for as long as possible. There are many SEO companies out there who burn and churn through customers but this is not our approach and it never will be.
Mark is pretty good at one liners but probably my favorite quote of the day was one his father told him:
“Today is the youngest you’ll ever be. Live like it.” – Mark Cuban’s Dad
Thanks again to Mark for coming out and sharing his experience as a successful entrepreneur with us. It was fun and benefited his charity, the Mavs Foundation. Mark, if CyberDust needs App Search Optimization or any of your SharkTank companies need SEO, you know who to call on – 512-865-8050.
