Here is a newly released excerpt from ONO.  Hope you enjoy.

Creative Entrepreneurism

In a recent conversation with my friends, Aaron and Sara, I was sharing my thoughts about how to acquire wealth by limiting your lifestyle and delaying your wants.  Aaron is an entrepreneur in pursuit of wealth and was on board with all of my theories.  But when I started talking about making hard decisions when choosing a car, both he and Sara started grinning.  Sara then said, “That sacrifice can be overcome by creativity; I know from personal experience.”  I was intrigued and asked her to tell her story.

Sara took me back several years to the time when Aaron had just quit his corporate job to pursue an entrepreneurial business venture.  They knew there were better things in store for him in an independently owned business.  However, there were sacrifices that had to be made with the career change, and the largest of these was giving back his company-issued vehicle.  Because of this, he, Sara and their three young children had only one car and they were not in a financial position to buy another one, even a used one.

Sara was supportive and willing to make the sacrifices necessary, but this particular one was especially hard on her.  Aaron needed the car to do service calls all day and Sara was left at home with the kids and without a vehicle.  For eight months, they lived like that.  Sara had to wait until Aaron came home at night to use the car.  During the day, she had to rely on friends to give her rides to the grocery store and to take their kids to soccer practice.

One day while Sara was online, a pop-up appeared at the top of the screen that read, “Get a Free Car!” On any normal day, she would have rolled her eyes at the obvious gimmick, closed the pop-up, and continued with her business.  But, because of her I-need-a-car-so-badly-I-can-hardly-stand-it status, her curiosity got the best of her and she clicked on the pop-up.  As she browsed the website, she found out there were companies willing to give you a car if you would let them “wrap” it, that is, put a giant vinyl sticker around the entire car with the company’s logo on it for advertising purposes.

This particular website wanted people to pay them to find a company willing to do this, and there was a six-to-twelve-month waiting period.  Because of that, this particular program wouldn’t work for Sara, but it did spark an idea.

Sara ran with the idea of trying to get a company to buy and wrap a car for her.  She put in hours of research on the Internet and began to call local business establishments.  Her first few calls led to dead ends, but finally, a local car dealership agreed to discuss her idea.  She approached the sales manager with her story, her plan, and her research.  After several days of discussion and bargaining, the dealership agreed to set Sara up with a car wrapped with their advertisements.  In fact, they even threw in leather seats and a DVD player upgrade.  In turn, Aaron and Sara agreed to buy the car on the company’s five-year finance plan and, for the first two years, the dealership made the payments in exchange for the advertising wrap.

Thanks to her ingenuity and determination, Sara took matters into her own hands and overcame their problems without putting the family’s financial situation in jeopardy.

Another one of my favorite things about this story is the way Sara was supportive of Aaron’s desire to pursue an entrepreneurial career.  They both knew the sacrifices their family needed to make, and they were both committed to the decision.  It is so important for husbands and wives to be on the same page when it comes to business and finances.  Statistics in the book, The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, indicate that if one spouse is a saver and the other is a spender, the couple has a much lower chance of financial success than when both share the value of saving.  For an entrepreneurial career to work, both spouses need to commit to making it work.