John Corcoran 6:07
After that occurred, you went into a boy’s home for a year, year and a half while the trial was happening, he said, and he
Victor Nunnemaker 6:17
was like, my father’s family. And I can’t fault them for that. But they fought for custody of us, as did my mother’s family. And ultimately, my mother’s family won custody. But during that period, my brother and I were in a boy’s home while my sister was in a girl’s home and we were separated. And when the first degree murder verdict came down, and my father was sentenced to death row, we were made Ward’s of the court, as they call it. And then ultimately, my grandparents took us for a short period until my aunt and uncle could take us. And very shortly after my aunt and uncle took us in with my mom’s other sister, and her husband died in a plane crash leaving three daughters. So those three daughters, the three of us, and then my aunt’s four children all came together and prospered on my uncle’s $28,000 a year mechanic salary. Wow.
John Corcoran 7:24
So 10 Kids 10 of you 10 kids? Yeah. 10 Kids $20,000 a year. And as you said earlier, the way that you survived was going into the woods. And this is in Northern California. This is Ukiah County, correct. Mendocino County, where you’re living, okay. And, and you’re going out into the woods getting wood. And you mentioned, if you’d see a deer, you’d shoot it, and then you’d have venison.
Victor Nunnemaker 7:52
Yeah, we always have the guns in the back of the truck. And very often we’d see a deer while we’re wood cutting. And so we’d throw that on top of the, you know, one or two cords of wood that we had just cut and split and take that back home and, you know, basically skim the deer and then package the meat and put it in the freezer, we had one of those big giant, white freezers in the garage, and it basically stored all of our protein for the year. Hmm.
John Corcoran 8:21
Obviously, financial education is incredibly important to you. You’ve credited a lot of your success to that you devote a lot of your time now to helping others who don’t have a financial education to learn. At what point did you start realizing that you needed to educate yourself about these sorts of things?
Victor Nunnemaker 8:43
Good question. I have to say it was when I got to high school in Fort Bragg. They had an organization called FBLA, future business leaders of America. I don’t even know what type of organization still exists. But I got involved in that for whatever reason, and they encouraged me to put a resume together and who knew what a resume was at that time. We didn’t really mean there were computers, but we were taking typing classes in school at the time on a typewriter, something most kids today wouldn’t know how to start with. And we would do little competitions that were both regional and local, regional, and then statewide, where we go and interview and do various different. So I was introduced at that age to the concept of education and jobs and so forth. And I realized very quickly as I and I was fortunate to be a good student and to excel in the classroom, that my grades could take me a lot further than getting a job and so I got into some trouble because I was the black sheep of the family. I was told that I needed to get a job and that there would not be money for college and that there was no way that My aunt and uncle can support me and I and I understood that. But I also had a One of my earliest mentors was Sid Long. And my daughters named after Sid Long, Sid long as is a man. But he happened to be my best friend’s dad and also the counselor of our school. And he sort of coached and mentored me along the way. And let me know that there were scholarships and there were opportunities and so forth. And so very early on, I started learning about alternatives to what I was being taught growing up alternatives to just a j-o-b a job that would allow me to get out of Fort Bragg to go and get an education and to and to do something bigger than the small town that I grew up in offered. And nothing against the small town that I grew up in, I now have a ranch very close to that town. And I love it. And it was a wonderful place to grow up in, in hindsight. But you have to get out of there in order to see the world and understand the opportunities that actually exist.
John Corcoran 11:09
So if you did something very unusual, you actually went and studied abroad in Germany, halfway around the world in high school, not even in college, but did sit long and inspire that at that combo.
Victor Nunnemaker 11:21
Absolutely. He actually because of my very strong opinions, my mind and I clashed a lot on where I was going and what I was going to do. And that isn’t to say I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, I was you know, went to stay I cross country and track I was an athlete and a straight A student. But we had ideas about what I wanted to do in my life. And because we didn’t agree. The old speech, either you live by our rules, or you’re out of this house. So I left at 15 and I went and I was with sin LA I was living at Sid Long’s house with my best friend and this brother is parents and his mom. And one day said mom brought home a flyer for a Rotary International scholarship to study abroad and said hey rotary local Rotary Club is offering to send a student abroad to study Would you be interested in absolutely so I applied for that and and and I had this pay I applied for to get a whole bunch of people was selected as the number one person thought I was going to Japan for a long time. And then at the last moment, my first choice was Germany, just because my last name Nunnemaker, I didn’t speak a word of either language. And I got to switch and go to Germany. And lo and behold, it was an amazing experience. I learned learn German fluently, and in a year went to a German High School and lived in a German family where my parents didn’t speak any English, which was perfect because it forced me to learn the language. By the time I left after about 13 months there, I was translating for Sri Lankan refugees and the local church and they were paying me 15 demark, because it was demarks at the time, an hour to do that. So that was a fantastic job. And instead long basically, if he hadn’t brought home that flyer and handed it to me, and it wasn’t all easy, it wasn’t like someone just handed it to me, I had to go through a panel interview second to get the buyer to get the proof to do it. And then I had to pay for my own plane tickets, I still had to come up with $1,100, which was a massive amount of money. So my grandmother said, ‘If you come and help me paint my three houses, I will pay for your plane ticket. So I went and spent three or four weeks with my grandmother painting for houses, which again, in hindsight, was the good old days, I got to spend that time with the grandmother who was also a mentor of mine and inspiration. And, she paid for that plane ticket.
John Corcoran 14:06
Wow. And looking back. Now, how did that experience of going away during high school? How did that shape you and shape what direction you went in? in life?
Victor Nunnemaker 14:18
Yeah, great question. If sometimes you get the question like what year of your life changed or altered or made the biggest impact and by far by far was that year 15 and a half to 16 and a half, 17 years old. And I went into Germany, I was exposed to so much more than I had ever, ever could have dreamed. I was at what city
John Corcoran 14:43
were you in Germany.
Victor Nunnemaker 14:45
I was a Rotary exchange student and I was in four different families. So is in four different small towns, but they were all in North Rhine, which is that sort of counting if you will of North Western Germany, outside of Dusseldorf. If you know what That is okay. Um, but the name of this town that I went to school in was called Moers moers. And I went to the game Nazim idol foenum. Yes. Which is at the high school of, of the area. And, and yeah.
John Corcoran 15:18
So you were saying kind of how it influenced you just to eat massive impact on you as a person.
Victor Nunnemaker 15:27
Yeah, you know fort bride wasn’t known for speaking languages or being very culturally diverse or, or, or, and, and I was placed in a first home that I went to my host father was the resident ceo of what, probably the largest Savings Bank in Germany, they drove a Mercedes of 500 Sel, they had a beautiful home and they, you know, three days after I got there, we went to on vacation, the French Riviera, all sounds like something that Kardashians would do. But for me, I’ve never been on a plane. Before I went to Germany, much less done an international or Vegas, our vacations were camping, I loved it, we had, I have great memories of doing that. And I’m super grateful to my aunt and uncle. And you know, and let me say, for all their shortcomings, to imagine that at the age of 33, which is how old my aunt was for her to take on six additional kids and, and dedicate her life to raising us and keeping us all together in one spot, and holding it all together. Super, super grateful, the utmost respect for her and, and I can’t thank her enough, I can’t imagine if we were adopted by several different people, and I hadn’t been able to grow up with my brother and sister I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine a life otherwise. So I was really in some ways cradled, after that, and allowed to sort of prosper and have the ability to make choices as opposed to what might have happened it could have gone south from there. And that’s not to say it wasn’t hard growing up there. And I’ve been very unfortunate I’ve lost one of my sisters, I’ve lost several of my siblings to drugs and alcohol You know, my little brother passed away and my older sister head on collision due to drugs and alcohol at the same time and took her daughter with her in the car. It has been, it’s been crazy. And I always have attributed where I am to the education that I was fortunate to be able to get and always super grateful and I speak several times a year to the rotary foundation all over the literary spoken all over the world. And, and I’ve touched, my goal has always been to give back at least twice as much in scholarships as they gave me. Because they believed in me at a time when I needed help. And they helped me both as a rotary exchange student in high school. Later, they gave me a scholarship, a small one a couple $1,000 to go to college and undergraduate. And then when after graduating from undergraduate, I got a Chancellor’s award at UC and they found me and said, Hey, we’d like to sponsor you to apply for a $25,000 scholarship to get to go abroad and get your masters and so that’s why I went back to Switzerland and did my math and worked on my graduate studies in the Hawks hope shoulders and gone. It’s not an MBA program, because they don’t have MBAs over there. I was called a temp program. And so I spent my graduate studies there studying that, and they gave me $25,000 to do that. So it was I was super fortunate and without organizations like that, I would not have been able to, to overcome some of the challenges that I had. And so I you So to your point, I try to give back where I can and I try to encourage both kids to reach out and fill out with billions of dollars that go on untapped in scholarships, and I and I encourage Rotarians and people who are fluent and who have been fortunate and didn’t have challenges growing up or have overcome those challenges to give those kids that opportunity. My one of my favorite quotes is how many Einsteins were never discovered because they died in a village or Hamlet in Africa somewhere of starvation. And that’s super sad. We’re so sorry about that.
John Corcoran 19:37
So um, but I wanted to take a step backwards though cuz you end up at UC Santa Barbara also my alma mater go gauchos. And you but you ran track. Is that how you got into the school? And what was that process like just getting to college, in a family where there are so many kids and no one had gone to college before?
Victor Nunnemaker 19:59
Yeah, so As I said, I left home at 15. I thought when I came back from Germany, I actually went to live with my hosts with Sid Long again. And the mom is one who started bringing home the flyers he replied to called, hey, you should buy this phone. And I was a straight A student and I did very, very well on the AC t. So I applied to a plethora of schools and, and I was admitted to both Georgetown and Stanford with a half scholarship, but a half scholarship to go to each of those schools didn’t work for me. So I ended up going to UCSB because I got a full scholarship, full ride scholarship, and it wasn’t attractive. There wasn’t a D1 school we didn’t offer scholarships at that store. So that track and cross country running track and cross country at UC Santa Barbara was just something I wanted to do. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t that it was paid to do or.
John Corcoran 20:51
And you also worked three different jobs during school in addition to running track, including I love this night watchman at the zoo. And I asked you, you gotta have some crazy stories about that. And you got to tell us a story about running a mountain lion
Victor Nunnemaker 21:08
Absolutely. Yeah, I did. I worked a lot of jobs. bussing tables barback at spice plays, I helped an eighty-year-old lady edit her book and put it onto a disk because I was also a microcomputer consultant at the lab, which is at UC Santa Barbara. And, and then yeah, one of the things you have to figure out when you’re working in trying to go to school is how do you combine the two and, apply some leverage so I figured out that I could do my rounds in the truck in about 17 minutes at the at the local Santa Barbara Zoo and spend the other 43 minutes studying and they were okay with that as it was for 4pm until midnight was my shift. And so I get a ton of studying there but one night I don’t remember exactly how far into the job but I was driving around in a little pickup truck and they’re in the middle of the road that I was driving on outside of his gauge was them with a massive Puma Cougar just laying there twitching his tail looking up at me and I’m like oh shit and and so luckily I had one of those breaks bones in the truck and I called the trainer at the zoo and they had the police and the trainer and everyone down there pretty quickly and and and had to counted up the mountain lion so
John Corcoran 22:37
I guess he got okay with that. Yeah, that’s funny. So she’s often you get you do the Graduate Studies in Switzerland, you become a CFO at some point, are you having this hankering that you want to be an entrepreneur that you want to found your own company?
Victor Nunnemaker 22:53
guy, I think like a lot of people go and get a college education. You think if I just work hard I can and I’ll get to the top I’ll become you know, if you’re a finance guy, I’ll become CFO, and then everything will be great, I won’t have to work for everyone, well, then you’re just reporting to the Board of Directors, there’s always someone you’re reporting to in life, that never actually changes. And so I probably spent too much of my life trying to climb the corporate ladder. And, and not really pursuing my passions, per se. But I was fortunate right out of undergraduate to get a job with Price Waterhouse and then work for Genentech and Oracle before going to Corio where as Vice President of finance and you know, draft a BS one took them public and so forth, which is extensively the first cloud company that word cloud didn’t exist, but we basically hosted software for the people at the time, Siebel PeopleSoft. And, and it was a, it had the recurring revenues that had really, really fast growth, you know, multi year contracts, all the things that a lot of people now are focusing on for the SaaS companies, they already had that. So it was a super neat experience, and to be able to go through that to draft an s one and, and and take a company public in and especially because we did it in June of 2000. If you recall the time, March was when after March, timber was the second bigger crash. And then we sort of threaded the needle and raised it with $180 million for the company. And so we were totally solid company. The problem was half of our customers went bankrupt. So it wasn’t that we didn’t have a great revenue stream. We were profitable. We were actually cash flow positive. We had, you know, gone through all the steps and had a totally solid model, but we couldn’t foresee that half of the companies that were our customers would actually go bankrupt. We survived because we had plenty of cash but a sign of the times was that I recall at some point, we had about $3 a share in cash and the stock was trading for $1 90. So it’s one of those, you know, I sometimes say, you know, there’s a lot of ways to make a million dollars, and there’s a lot of ways to lose it. At one point, my options were worth 10s of millions of dollars. And by the time it was all over zero, and I couldn’t touch it, because there was a six month lockout and everything. So it’s not like I did anything wrong, I couldn’t sell anyway, I just took them public. And the options went from all the way up to $21. And all the way down to up to 190. And ultimately, the company ended up getting sold to IBM. So you know, it’s one of those, one of those Silicon Valley stories.
John Corcoran 25:36
Yeah. And so was it hard going from that. That’s kind of like you’re at a high level as your CFO, we’ve taken a company public to go back to scrappy starting your own bootstrapped company, or maybe raise venture capital. What was the first business that you started after that?
Victor Nunnemaker 25:56
Yeah, so about that time, I’d started a business in real estate. So I was sometime in the late 90s. I got on a plane and you know, many probably tell the same story but in in the seat in front of me was Kiyosaki, Kiyosaki his book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I read that book, and it just spoke to me because I was that poor kid that was struggling to overcome it. And, and I then really quickly read through all of his books. And, you know, one of the things he stresses, you know, there’s four ways to make money. One of them is Adobe, and you have to trade your time for that job. And your time is limited. So get out of that. And, and phone cash flow producing houses, one of you know, we’re so real estate owned investments that are making some kind of a dividend or causing her to start a business. And so that’s where it started taking my mind and said, Okay, I’m going to do No, I’m just naive to know you couldn’t do all those things. So I just did them all. And, and, and was successful, I set a goal for myself, I was gonna buy 10 houses in 10 years, I failed. I only got eight houses in 10 years. But who cares. I then moved into residential or commercial real estate buying sort of commercial buildings, and then into sort of development partnering with people to develop at one point we developed 18 condo units up near Sonoma State and did very similar things. So that was the first real company that I started in and pursued. And part of that I was doing in tandem with taking Corio public. And then after Corio, I didn’t go straight into starting a company, I actually went back to a biotechnology company, as their CFO, and did a secondary job for them. financing. And they were a small molecule oncology drug company that is no longer around there, the drugs sort of failed in phase three clinical trials. But I spent a couple of years there before actually going back, and then sort of said, I’m going to take a year off, I’m going to try and figure out what what I want to do. And I often quote that Louis pasteur chance favors the mind that’s prepared for it. I spent that year literally looking at a ton of different ideas. And, you know, from a financial standpoint, it maybe wrongly, so I wasn’t looking at things I might be passionate about. But I was looking for things that would be profitable, because I can, I can read the financial statements really well, like most people read a book. And so I knew what would work and what wasn’t. And I came across and I actually started adventure racing and was on a show on TV on LLN life network channel doing adventure racing for over a year. And during that process, it was a global extremes Mount Everest challenge was the name of the show. And I one of the guys on my team starts telling me that his dad bought this company and owns the patents to a bunch of technology. And I Three weeks later, I was out there meeting with his dad bought the rights to these six patents to basically horizontally socket concrete. So the finance guy goes into concrete. So I had to get a contractor’s license, I then figured out how to horizontally socket concrete to repair sidewalk trip hazards to comply with Americans with Disabilities Act. And from their developed we developed an app to basically track where trip hazards were in cities started signing up first apartments and, and that type of thing in schools and then later, the cities and…
John Corcoran 29:31
What a different experience so from taking drafting s one taking companies public to, I don’t know if you were the one who was out there going to cities and explaining to them why they should hire you to cross cut the sidewalks. But such a different experience getting your contractor’s license all of that?
Victor Nunnemaker 29:49
Yeah, yeah, it was a totally different experience. And that’s one of the things that I’ve loved. And, and, and value in my life is constant education. I’m always trying to do something new, and learn something new. And I, I, I try to instill that in my two teenagers that life is, life is about learning and experiences. It’s not about what you accumulate, and that if you are constantly learning, you’ll be fine. And so I’ve never been afraid to jump into well, biotech, high tech, auditing, then over to concrete. Now, as you pointed out, I’m a farmer, I have 1200 apple trees, I’ve learned how to make cider, hard cider. And I’m, I’m exploring Calvados. Making Calvados, went over to France, and did a little mini one day internship at a bunch of different Calvados producers to understand how to make Calvin O’s, which is Apple brandy made in, in northern Normandy in northern France. And I like anything that triggers my mind to learn something new. And, and that
John Corcoran 31:00
I want, I want to ask you about your involvement, eo, because I get the sense of what you said about giving back that taps into something deeper in your psyche, the idea of giving back and, you know, he owes a great organization for helping one another, that’s kind of the core of its ethos. But before we get to that, you mentioned you have two kids, how have you talked to them about your childhood and, and explained to them and tried to impart some of that wisdom on them, and also put it into context, just so that they can understand,
Victor Nunnemaker 31:32
I don’t know, if you can, it’s hard to ever know, if you can put it into context, they’re very aware of it, I sheltered them from that, for the first 10 or 12 years of their life, then I told them about it, and let them ask questions, and so forth. And then as you were at the eo tox event that we did that I did, where I that was one of the first real public forums in which I disclosed and told some stories of that, I made sure they were there, so they could hear it from me in that format. I think they have a lot of respect, and, and understanding of how incredibly fortunate they are not to have those struggles. I joke that I need to manufacture difficulties and challenges for them, so that they learn how to overcome those things. Because Make no mistake, I think when you’ve overcome something like that, and various other things that I’ve had to overcome in my life, it is an It is incredible confidence booster, and helps you to not be afraid to fail as a farmer or fail as a concrete cutter or fail as a, you know, whatever. You just feel like if I can do that I can do anything. And so that’s what I tried to instill in them is, is just that you are incredibly fortunate because of that. There are a lot higher expectations, you’re not starting where I started, you’re starting way beyond it. And I often, quote, a good friend of mine who moved here at a young age from Africa. And you know, he believes that there are four stages in your life. And you know, the, what I call the four S’s and the first one is survival. And if you’re born in Africa, that’s pretty dang important. If you’re born in America, it’s almost a given, although not guaranteed. The second stage of struggle, certainly was there. And that’s basically trying to figure out the third stage is success. And that is when you’ve achieved a certain whether it is what you’re everyone’s definition is different. But whether it’s having your own house or just being a successful point in your life where you have a good job that is much further than 99% of the world ever gets. And then the fourth stage is giving back. How do I make an impact with the asset’s significance? But how do I know how I am going to be significant in helping other people to get through those stages? And so I try to view it through that scope and lens and figure out okay, how can I have the most impact now that I have gotten through the success period, to give back and be significant for someone else who might be in the same shoes that I was
John Corcoran 34:19
or worse. And so talk about your involvement in eo and what role that has played for you. You know, giving back with fellow entrepreneurs and being a part of that community and helping That’s how that’s helped with your growth. Yeah, sure.
Victor Nunnemaker 34:33
I mean, you know, first I’d say, eo, help helped me. immensely. I joined eo, because when you go from high tech biotech and all these MBAs and scientists around you super smart people, to concrete, no offense, but a lot of them don’t have an upper degree, they, you’re, you’re not surrounded by smart individuals anymore. And you’re in and you’re trying to end and you miss the conversations, you miss the intellectual stimulation. And so when I discovered eo, I probably waited way too long, because I was introduced to it by my friend, Jay Gupta, who was a member of the Silicon Valley chapter. And, and, and I didn’t join for another two years. But when I did join, literally, it was like, three weeks in our forum, moderator announces that he’s selling his business and moving to Italy, and I’m like, I should sell my business, you know, and it wasn’t, I’d always had in the back of my mind that that’s what I would do, I’d have an exit strategy. But you know, but you see someone else do it. And it’s just like, yeah, I should do that. And so I started planning to literally that day. And I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have done it without eo, but I might not have done it as quickly. And then secondarily, just having these amazing entrepreneurs around me, who were all struggling with the same issues, helped me to, you know, deal with the issues that I had, whatever those issues were. And I found quickly that I had a lot of issues that I was dealing with, that they had never dealt with. And that helped them along the way. And so now as people in eo are selling their company, I’ve had quite a few people approach me and say, hey, what would you do here? Hey, can you tell me about that? Hey, what’s the process for that? And so I sit down with literally dozens of people and given I mean, now we even have the presentation on selling your company and why and the presentation itself is called avoiding entrepreneurial prop poverty, but it includes that, yeah.
John Corcoran 37:05
I want to ask you about what the dynamic has been like for you coming from a poor family, and, and being the one who’s made it out has been successful, has a lot of wealth. What’s the dynamic like for you with the family and those who haven’t come up out of poverty and I ask it, in part, because I know that this is a big part of your mission, is providing financial education for more people.
Victor Nunnemaker 37:11
Yeah, early on, I knew that I needed to separate myself. And put distance between me and my immediate family that I grew up with. You know, one of the things I teach my kids also is, is, hey, you’re a product of the people that you surround yourself with. And if you only surround yourself with average, or with one particular thing, and never expose yourself to other options, other ideas, other thoughts, you are going to be the product of that you have surrounded yourself with How can anyone not be so I knew that I needed to separate myself because I was being pushed in a direction that I didn’t want to end up and I knew that I wanted more than what I saw around, you know, the Fort Bragg town that I grew up in. And, and that’s not taking anything away from them. And I have some siblings who have, you know, who have jobs and careers and are doing okay, now and have come a long way. And I’ve tried to reach back out, especially in the last four or five years, and if for no other reason, just to make contact and establish that they are my family, but also to help them if they need help in some way. Know that I’m there and then I’m available. But one of the big things someone told me really a long time ago was we all get lots and lots of options out of it. The difference is those who choose to take those options, those who choose to choose to pursue them because there’s a lot everyone in the in the world has a million things that go by it and if you’ve made a split, you’re not prepared for it new pester again says chance favors my and or maybe you just think it’s too hard. Or maybe you just don’t think you can do it. You know, I don’t know what it is, um, I I had to distance myself from, you know, drugs, alcohol, the things that I knew would drag me down and not going to school, lack of education, the things that I felt would drag me down. And again, I don’t I I don’t judge any of my siblings for choosing not to go to school. But sometimes I think you don’t have a choice. If you’re not aware that there is one.
John Corcoran 39:41
So yeah, for that, thank you for that. Um, I want to wrap up, we’re almost out of time on a wrap up to the two questions that I always ask. And, obviously, you know, the relationships, the people around you that mentors, they shape and guide all of us. But looking right now at contemporaries looking at others that you would consider maybe peers, maybe other eo forum meets other entrepreneurs around you. Who’s out there, who do you respect to, who do you admire? Who’s, who would consider contemporaries or peers or other guild members?
Victor Nunnemaker 40:53
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s probably hundreds of them. So it’s, it’s hard to ever just pick one. But there are people throughout my life who have had a larger impact, said long was one of those people. My host father in Germany, helmet cruiser, was another one of those, he was a very successful businessman. And he, you know, we would have dinner every single night together, in spite of that, which is something I’ve carried to my own family and tried to propagate and make sure that we have and also just taught me about business. I mean, I I attribute some of that. The reason I went into business to have been fortunate to live with him. And, you know, and then as you go along, you inevitably come across people, the CFO of Corio, when we took them public, Eric Keller, who went on to become one of the partners at Kleiner Perkins, was an enormous influence in my life. He would, you know, he was always there at 6:30am. Every morning, except Thursdays, he wouldn’t show up till 11 o’clock. And after I’d been there about a year and proved myself, myself. And so when I got up the guts to say, Where are you every where do you go on Thursday morning, things like, Victor, I have a very important meeting on Thursday mornings, and you need to start going to those meetings, do you own a bicycle, and I found out that he was cycling, and so I started cycling with him. And so he was a big influence on on on me, because, you know, he, just the way that he handled himself in executive meetings, the way that he held himself, it was inspiring the way he was very end, he did it in a very thoughtful, nice way, you get so many executives who aren’t nice. We’ve all seen the Steve Jobs movie and various other things. Eric was anything but that, but wicked smart and how he used comedy. I still wish I could use comedy The way he does to just lighten the moment or whatever. And certainly my forum, I mean, you’re very familiar forums. You know, I have an amazing group around me. It’s fluctuated over the six or seven years I’ve been in eo now. But the other day I came across a photo of the people who are no longer Oh, and I sent it to them, they had an impact on me, they inspired me and you know, they’re mentors of mine, by virtue of having their own incredible successful businesses. When you see what someone else has done or can do. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not unlike Roger Bannister in the four minute mile, and no one thought it was possible until he broke it and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you had four or five more people breaking it within months. And that’s an inspiration to me is just seeing other people do something and knowing that I’m not afraid of hard work, I’ll do whatever it takes to get on the investing side, if anyone’s interested, one of the one a very big influences in me in the last two or three years. which is unusual as you get older to find someone new who teaches you a great deal is is a gentleman an older gentleman by the name of Saul Rosenthal, and, and he has a a website, which is called Saul’s Investing Discussions on the Motley Fool board in which he has created a incredible community of investors who add and give tremendously of their time, and in which, in which he posts and blogs on both his investment and more importantly on his investment philosophy. And as he was a former psychiatrist, so psychology, and I think the psychology of investing is a really important one, especially on days and weeks like we’ve had this week and today when the market is absolutely getting crushed. And I would Say that he’s been a mentor of mine and, and taught me some new tricks and investing which had been phenomenal. And he’s an amazing person if you can jump on there and read about, in addition to the things that I mentioned in the Digital Porcupine.
John Corcoran 44:46
Alright, I think he answered the second question I won’t ask it won’t ask again. I was it was more about like, you know, inspiration from your childhood said long and your host father as well I think that answered as well. So any final words of wisdom for anyone listening to this? Who wants to get more of a financial education understand how the world works, investing works, markets works? Pulling up pops up?
Victor Nunnemaker 45:40
Absolutely. Absolutely. As you know, I have a website and I try to blog on that website combination of what my portfolio is and also just teaching people about stocks about investing about different options than just having a job. One of the things that I told my daughter who just applied to 21 schools is I said, I know you’re going into anything but business I said, but you will take business classes in college as long as I’m paying for it. Take the time to learn what the three financial statements are. And there’s three there’s there’s exactly three parts to each of the three financial statements. So three financial statements with three parts each learn what they are and how each one’s different. I see so many businesses, multi million dollar businesses, of people with people who don’t know what the three financial statements are, everyone knows what the p&l is, profit expenses are sorry, revenue expenses, and then profit or loss. But people don’t know the difference between that and the balance sheet. And then most people don’t even use the cash flows to me just understand what the three are. Investing you know, investing, whether it’s in real estate or in stocks, is is critical, you’re not going to make you’re not going to get out of your jlb unless you can figure out a way to replace that income. And that’s not going to be through point 01 percent in your checking account. So that money needs to go somewhere. And if you’re choosing to put money in and invested into a company, make sure you understand the financial statements and you can look at how the company is doing and make sure that they’re profitable. Look at the different pieces of the company whether it’s the management whether it’s the margins of the company, a company that makes $100 but has more and has margins of 5% they take home $5 a company that makes $100 but has 90% margin they take home $90 which one’s better people don’t realize that and that the one that takes home $90 should be higher valued higher. And so there are all kinds of things like that that take an accounting class and learn the language of business because accounting is the language of business and be able to speak it just one class in accounting and take one class in finance so that you understand it and maybe one class in business ethics so you don’t land yourself in jail devices
John Corcoran 47:34
Well, Victor, this has been wonderful digitalporcupine.com I know is the website for you anywhere else people can go to learn more or to connect or to learn more about what you do.
Victor Nunnemaker 47:45
you know if you want to learn about or follow the ranch, it’s ad on Instagram at Politico ranch and we are going to do hipcamp this year a few times and have some people up to stay in our Safari tents that we set up a bunch of Safari tents that are gorgeous with mattresses and tables and Persian rugs in them. So it’s really nice glamping experience so if you want to do that you’re welcome to follow me on actually go ranch and you know other than that I’m around and the website you gave Digital Porcupine is Yeah, I blog two or three times a week
John Corcoran 48:24
go opt in there and Victor thank you so much for your time.
Victor Nunnemaker 48:28
No worries. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to be here.
Outro 48:31
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the Revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.