In a keynote speech during the second-day opening session at NBAA-BACE, “Shark Tank” superstar Daymond John shared his recipe for successful entrepreneurship. The 54-year-old businessman, investor, and television personality explained how he hustled his way to the top despite growing up financially strained and having no college education.
He summed up his advice for aspiring business aviation entrepreneurs in a fitting acronym, SHARK, which stands for: set your goals, do your homework, amor (or “love” in Spanish), remember your brand, and keep swimming.
“Now you in the aviation world understand setting goals, because you understand how to set an automatic pilot,” he said, adding that when an aircraft veers off course “the automatic pilot keeps bringing me back. What I realized in life is that we may set goals on numbers we want to hit, we may set goals on destinations and logistics, but we don’t set our personal goals.”
John explained he went from handing out flyers for just a couple bucks an hour and waiting tables at Red Lobster to building his own hip-hop-inspired apparel company, FUBU. When he created FUBU (“For Us By Us”) in 1992, he was working from his mom’s house, sewing hats and screen-printing t-shirts with his logo.
“I set a goal that no matter what, we're gonna live, die, and prosper in the world of hip hop,” he said. “Now the only problem was I couldn't rap, I couldn't sing, I couldn't dance, and I couldn't produce.” Yet he stuck true to his goal.
To market the brand, he convinced some upcoming hip-hop artists from his neighborhood in Queens, New York, to begin wearing FUBU, and the brand started gaining popularity. But it was no overnight success; it took almost 10 years, multiple near-collapses, and a $100,000 mortgage loan on his mom’s house before FUBU really took off. Today, the company is worth more than $6 billion.
Now a successful financier and businessman, John has an estimated net worth of $350 million and often travels in business jets. Although he no longer owns a jet, he frequently charters flights.