Today is June 17 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you keep going regardless of the obstacles in your way?”
Suffering from undiagnosed attention deficit hyper disorder and dyslexia Paul Orfalea was a “C” student in college.
Following graduation, it was difficult for him to hold a job, so he decided to start his own company. He asked his father to cosign a loan for $5,000 and leased an 80-square-foot former hamburger stand near the University of California at Santa Barbara, and rented a small Xerox copier, charging customers four cents a page.
He got the idea for a photocopy store from watching students make copies in the school library. His goal was to offer college students with products and services they needed at a competitive price. He named the store Kinko’s after his curly red hair.
To supplement his income, Orfalea also went from one dormitory room to another in the evenings, hawking his wares from a knapsack.
When his first Kinko’s proved a success, Orfalea decided to open stores on other campuses. Lacking funds to finance them and having no desire to franchise, Orfalea opened new Kinko’s on his ability to build relationships with others and formed partnerships with owner-operators, retaining a controlling interest in each.
“These partners were other students who scouted locations along the West Coast, sleeping in their Volkswagen buses or fraternity houses. Publicity consisted of flyers stuffed in mailboxes; orders were taken and delivered personally.” Due to his inability to read and write, he realized early on that to get through school he was going to need help from a lot of people. Orfalea turned his entrepreneurial vision into a $2 billion-a-year company with more than 1,500 branches and 21,000 coworkers. In 2004, Kinko’s was acquired by the FedEx Corporation.
As author W. Clement Stone noted “Everyone who achieves success in a great venture, solves each problem as they came to it. They helped themselves. And they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They keep going regardless of the obstacles they met.”
Orfalea kept going regardless of the obstacles in his way. Do you?