Me, Inc. (15 page)

Marriage later.

First, a successful career.

Write that down, children.

And now, a lesson from my personal life. Ladies, unless love overwhelms all logic, don't marry your beloved in his twenties or thirties. He will let you down. He's immature. He may look like a man, but—and believe me, I speak from experience here—at that age we're still just horny little boys on the inside. We're not as mature as you are. We don't have the urge to raise children. We just have testosterone. And lots of it.

Ladies, if you must get married, marry a more mature man of means. The advantages are twofold: a comfortable and safe lifestyle financially, which could mean more freedom for you to pursue your own entrepreneurial goals, and a more mature man who
might
be emotionally ready for marriage and settling down. Notice that I said “might.” Also, if you divorce a man of means, you won't have to go back out into the workforce—you will be able to take more risks with your entrepreneurial goals. Unlike the old model, the comfort of marrying someone of means is not a way to kick back—it is a way to give your own career a jump-start, if things go wrong.

I repeat: men, especially, don't get married until after you've made significant headway toward your fortune.

My story?

I stayed single most of my life, without a regular girlfriend. I had no expenses for gifts, travel, and the other costs that come with a relationship.

My first real “girlfriend” relationship was with Cher in 1978, when I was almost thirty years old. Cher was and is a great lady. I moved in with Cher to her home in Los Angeles. After a year or so, Cher decided to move to the Malibu Colony, by the beach. At the time, I was busy working on my first solo album. Cher rightfully asked me to share in the overhead, and I gladly did. I still had my penthouse on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, for which I was paying $800 per month. I also didn't own a car. I had very few financial obligations of any kind. Not to banks. Not to friends. Not to anyone. This, even after KISS was successful. Please take this example to heart—just because you can afford to throw money away, doesn't mean you have to.

Later, I was fortunate to have a relationship with Diana Ross. Diana is not only an iconic figure to fans around the world, but a wonderful mother to her children. Sometimes I would stay with her, and sometimes at my place in New York. We were together for two terrific years. In the same vein as Cher, we did not cover each other's expenses. We were independent, self-sufficient people. And if you can do that, and if something earth-shattering—like love—doesn't overwhelm your business plan, you should be self-sufficient.

On August 25, 1984, at an event called Midsummer Night's Dream at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, I met, and was immediately smitten with, Shannon Tweed. I'm sure you can imagine what the party was like.

I was awestruck like I had never been by a woman. She was more mature. More grounded. More in tune with what life is really about. And in a short while, Shannon and I began living together. First she moved into my New York place. Then I moved into Shannon's Los Angeles apartment, where she shared the rent with her sister Tracy and Ruben, their roommate.

Even though it felt like Shannon would be “the one,” I was cautious. I have always been cautious. Matters of the heart can take over your life.

After we had lived together for almost two years and had a cohabitation agreement, I decided to buy a home.

The first thing I did was sell my New York apartment. The market was good, and I was able to sell it for a large profit.

I had two years of tax-free use of that capital gain, which was the tax law at the time, so I took my time deciding how, when, and where I would make use of that tax advantage.

It became clearer to me every day that I was falling hard for Shannon, so I decided to buy a home in Los Angeles.

In 1985, I looked around and finally found a two-acre property in Beverly Hills, with a ranch home and guest house on it. I paid cash, against the advice of my business managers. I could afford it. It was well below my earnings and living standard, but I didn't like owing money to anyone—even with the advantages of tax deductions on interest and front-loading depreciation. But more on that later.

Shannon and I lived together for twenty-eight years, without ever having been married. I paid all the bills. Shannon raised the kids. I thought that I never wanted to get married. That's what I had convinced myself of as a young man.

It probably had to do with my father's failings as a businessman, as a father, and as a husband. I decided early on that I would succeed where my father failed.

Unfortunately, that also led to the thick armor with which I surrounded myself. That armor prevented me from being kind, loving, and open to being loved. I didn't want to be hurt the way I had been hurt, the way my mother had been hurt.

So I had to take my own personal journey to connect with matters of my heart, while being duly diligent to keep my business model intact.

So now I am happily married to my beloved Shannon Tweed Simmons.

As I write this, Shannon and I have been together for thirty-one years, but we've been married for only two years.

To put it bluntly, she put up with my sorry ass for all those years, and waited for me to gain a semblance of maturity. It took forever. I was arrogant and selfish and self-absorbed. And I'm ashamed at the lack of respect that I showed her, especially because she was the only true love of my life.

I'm now almost sixty-five years old, and I stayed unmarried until the age of sixty-two. “Will you still need me when I'm sixty-four,” indeed.

This is all familiar territory, from the chapter about our show. But my point here is this: I found the right partner, who I knew was in this for the right reasons.

The real truth of why I never got married is that I was afraid. I was afraid of commitment. I was afraid of the financial repercussions.

And statistics tell us I was right to be afraid, even if I was also afraid of my own unethical action. They say it's almost always the man who is the cause of the divorce. He either runs out on his family, or he's not committed enough to the marriage to keep it together. I didn't want to get married, I thought, because there was a huge financial minefield I would have to walk through. This would be true—if I hadn't found the right partner, who for years had verified her intentions to me. It took me too long to realize that she was not a risk to my fortune. She made it abundantly clear.

I was well-read enough to be aware of the community property and cohabitation laws in various states, and I knew all about prenups and other legal maneuvers. I was well aware that holy matrimony was potentially the largest financial exposure I would ever have.

If I got married without a prenup I would be liable for half of everything I had—that's pretax, gross.

Unromantic, I know, but I was afraid.

I walked into our marriage with open eyes and an open heart.

And I could
afford
to get married. Gladly.

But that didn't stop me from also having a prenuptial agreement. Prenups are not the most romantic notions in our society. But I see them as positive reinforcements of one's duties to the relationship. Better to discuss everything out in the open while you're in love, then if or when the relationship sadly ends. It's called Full Disclosure Before The Fact. I would urge all couples contemplating marriage to draw up a prenup. Even the most loving, trusting, and honest relationships can come to an acrimonious end and it's up to me to limit my financial exposure in this litigious society we all live in.

You must do the same. Find a partner—that word again—who is
trustworthy
. And make sure you can afford to trust them, in all senses of the word.

I couldn't have found a better partner. But I got very, very lucky. Be careful out there.

18

Brilliant Stupid Ideas/Designing the Right Business Model for You

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

ANONYMOUS

often mistakenly attributed to Confucius

T
here are many really stupid ideas that wind up being brilliant, if you can implement them.

If I had told you in the early seventies that I had a plan to sell bottled water to people, even though water is already free and you can get as much of it as you want by simply turning on your faucet, you probably would have laughed.

You probably would have been equally unimpressed if I told you that I wanted to get people to pay good money for Pet Rocks, even though you can walk down any street, bend over and pick up a rock, and start treating it as a pet, without paying a cent.

Yet one of these seemingly stupid ideas made its creator a millionaire, and the other became the foundation of an industry that generates $12 billion annually in the United States alone.

There are a lot of massively successful businesses that started out as stupid ideas.

Amazon started selling books online at a time when not many people were using credit cards on the Web.

Craigslist was free and not well designed.

Twitter did less than Facebook, and limited the letter count.

None of these ideas originally sounded like the model for a successful business. In fact, they sounded as crazy and impractical as, say, starting a rock band that wears more makeup and higher heels than your mother.

Your idea doesn't have to be original. In fact, it often helps if it's not.

But your idea is worthless, unless you figure out how to implement it, how to
make it happen
.

That often means you have to create a prototype (in other words, produce the first one as a sample). It also means you have to find the money to do so. And put together your team. And figure out who to sell your product or venture to.

There are also several questions that you must answer.

Do you manufacture it yourself?

Do you raise all the funds to manufacture it yourself?

Do you launch a local campaign, and once you achieve some success, do you then go to a bigger company and sell all or part of your venture?

YOU figure it out.

YOU have to do the research.

And YOU have to do it all yourself. Just like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sir Richard Branson, and Mark Zuckerberg had to do.

While there's some truth to the old saying that ideas are a dime a dozen, if you can implement your idea, and make it happen, the idea grows arms and legs and becomes
real
.

The implementation is more important than the idea itself.

I'm going to do an experiment for you, as I sit here typing my own manuscript.

I promise you, what I write below is something I will daydream, and come up with, right now—unedited. Here goes:

Here's an idea that just hit me: BABY 101. Hmmm. I don't know what it means exactly, but I like the sound of that. Is the name trademarked? Let me check. No, it's not.

Okay, I just told my lawyer to trademark it.

As stupidly simple as this sounds, this is how things often begin. There's a gut sense of something sounding “established,” or “sellable.” There's this intangible sense that some people have, that something is “catchy” or can be a “catch-all” name for a variety of ventures. The person who came up with “Amazon,” for example, may have been thinking of a river of books, but the title is elastic enough to apply to everything and anything under the sun—everything from A to Z. (Incidentally, this expression is incorporated via an arrow in the logo pointing from the A to the Z. Look it up.)

Once I've secured the trademark, I'll need to show that I've used it in other states, to shore up my trademark in the context of interstate commerce laws. So I'm going to make a BABY 101
^TM
T-shirt myself, and sell it to someone I know in New York for ten dollars. And presto, I'm in business! Maybe I'll make a logo for Baby 101 while I'm at it.

So, what
is
Baby 101
^TM
? Well, it can be whatever I say it is.

How about this? It's a TV show for young mothers and their babies.

We all have to take driver's end to learn to drive. Then we take a test, and if we pass it, we get a license to drive.

But there's no school for being a mother. There's no public-school course to teach young men and women about the joys and pitfalls of having babies at too young an age. And when the blessed event happens and she gives birth to a healthy and happy baby, then what?

What does the baby eat? How many times a day? Where do I get formula? Clothes? When does the baby sleep? How long? Does it need to be quiet? Or should I play music? What kind? If the baby is crying, what does that mean? The baby can't talk, and Mom doesn't understand baby talk.

So the daily Baby 101
^TM
TV show—you'll notice I'm using
^TM
right next to the title, which means it's trademarked—would be a time for new or expecting moms to learn lessons in parenting. And if I
own
the trademark and I'm one of the executive producers of the show, that opens up a truckload of possibilities for merchandising. Of course, I'll have to find a production partner to actually
make
the show, since I don't want to and don't know how to do that myself.