BIO: Ron Baker is the founder of VeraSage Institute—the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally. He’s also a radio talk-show host of The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy on Voice America.

STORY: Ron partnered with a group of friends and invested $70,000 to start a software company. All the partners had no experience or skills to run the business leading to its failure.

LEARNING: Seek out successful people and try to learn from them. Learn from your losses.

“When it comes to business, you’ve got to have your total skin in the game.”

Ron Baker

Guest profile

Ron Baker started his CPA career in 1984 with KPMG’s Private Business Advisory Services in San Francisco. Today, he is the founder of VeraSage Institute—the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally—a radio talk-show host on Voice America; the show is The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy.

Ron has authored seven best-selling books, including The Firm of the Future; Pricing on Purpose; Measure What Matters to Customers; and Implementing Value Pricing. His forthcoming book, Time’s Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms, will be published in November 2022.

Worst investment ever

Ron partnered with a couple of friends and started a software company. He invested about $70,000 into the company. The group wanted to write a software program to help firms value price. They hired a software engineer and spent a lot of money to get the program going.

They were all delusional and believed they were sitting on top of something radical and innovative. Their most significant setback was their lack of skills and experience in building a software company. All the partners also had other jobs and were treating business as a side-hustle, not paying it the full attention it needed. Needless to say, the business wasn’t successful.

Lessons learned

Seek out people who are successful and try to learn from them.
Make sure that you have partners who have skin in the game.

Andrew’s takeaways

Learn from your losses. If you lose money, at least make sure you gain knowledge from the experience.
Never overlook the randomness of success and failure.
Focus more on avoiding loss by reducing your risk as much as you focus on growth and success.

Actionable advice

Don’t be delusional and go into business just to confirm your biases. Keep in mind that business is much more complicated than most people think.

Ron’s recommended resources

Implementing Value Pricing for anyone who wants to learn more about pricing.
Time’s Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms for anyone who wants to understand the subscription model. Ron believes that in five years, we’ll have the option to subscribe to everything, so now is the time to perfect your subscription business.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Ron’s next project is to get his upcoming book Time’s Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms published and then go and speak and evangelize about it.

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