Thanks to the volume of correspondence we receive from you, our intrepid and incorrigible readers, we now have more people working in our mailroom than Santa has elves in his workshop. We’re running three shifts, 24/7/365. And we may have to add members to our mailroom staff, hours to our days, and days to our calendars. So, please be patient. We do try to respond to every letter we receive. But we also experience the occasional backlog. Bear with us. If we don’t respond to your letter in this post, we almost certainly will in the next one. If you keep ’em coming, we’ll keep the responses coming back atcha. ‘Nuff said.
Dear Mailbag,
My grandfather used to tell me I’ll be a great help to my mother someday. In the meantime, I want to be a serial entrepreneur. Here’s my exit strategy: I want to approach the investment community with a company that doesn’t exist yet, with a brand that hasn’t been established yet, offering products and services that haven’t been determined yet. I want to sell it off to a venture-capital firm or a private investor. Then I want to do it again and again until I have more money than God. Do you think that’ll work?
Whiz Kid
Dear WK, the idea of starting a business with the exit strategy — without, say, a business plan or a clue in the world what you’re doing — seems like the commercial equivalent of jumping from a plane without a parachute, holding a can of Drano in one hand and a gun in the other, just in case the fall doesn’t kill you. But we don’t want to be discouraging. Give it a go. And if you find an investor willing to buy whatever it is from which you’re planning to exit, send him our way.
Dear Mailbag,
I sell enterprise software systems, the acquisition costs of which typically run in the high six or low seven figures. Since I’m a believer in quantity over quality, and since I’ve done no research on my market at all, I’m installing a marketing-automation platform that will blitz every company I can construe as a lead, regardless how tenuous, with a ceaseless onslaught of emails. The platform will score the leads, determining which ones I should blitz even more relentlessly. How many emails do you think I’ll have to send before one of those leads buys my system?
Ceaselessly Eternal Optimist
Dear CEO, how long can you hold your breath?
Dear Mailbag,
I’ve never studied science of any kind, let alone environmental science. I’ve never won an award. I’ve never studied film. And I’ve never made a recording. But I’d like to make a panic-inducing propaganda film about the bogus notion that humans are responsible for the lethal warming of the earth. For the film and the corresponding book, I’d like to win a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar, and a Grammy Award. Do you think it’s possible to buffalo an entire planet?
Al Gore
Dear AG, fuggedaboudit.
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