I was speaking with my lawyer the other day about my extreme degree of frustration in having been unsuccessful at raising $2.5 Million for a consumer residential real estate mortgage lending financial services family of companies, from a potential equity partner/investor after almost 1 1/2 years trying. I was telling him I had aggressively gone after investment bankers, private equity funds, angel investors, and mortgage banker lawyers and hedge funds - as possibilities of folks who could aim me in the right direction to acquire these funds so I can re-start my old firm and do (for the fifth time in my career) a non-bank holding company with several related wholly - owned industry subsidiaries who's synergy and cross quality control works perfectly together. It's been a home run for me and a handful of my clients in the past. I even reminded him (even though we've known each other for 25+ years) about the vast network of industry big-shots I have come to know and the numerous connections I still have within the ranks of the executive offices here in America, and yet I haven't yet come up with one! But, everybody 'knows a guy' .... BULL
He's a real sharp guy, he listen carefully to me, then he told me a story about Charles deGaulle... years before he was a General, back when as a young officer, he developed the concept of armored warfare just after the First World War, as a means to break the stalemate of trench warfare. Everyone else was still looking backwards trying to figure out how to improve trenches. He was fairly ridiculed at the time. A few years later, when everybody was still working on how to build better more effective trenches, the Germans had read about the papers deGaulle had written and said '... hey that's it - TANKS! that's a great idea'... the German Blitz creed was born!
De Gaulle was famous for 'fighting the next war' and not the last one, the mistake so many old Generals tend to do (looking the wrong way), and that's the core advice he gave me. To get out of this mess and invest in our industry's future - you've got to have forward looking vision. He said, "... Peter it's all about timing, maybe next week you come across a half dozen of them, the changing landscape needs to get one of those forward looking Generals to think and then Bingo!"
We need more Generals who are looking to fight the next war and not the last one for our industry to turn around.
De Gaulle was famous for 'fighting the next war' and not the last one, the mistake so many old Generals tend to do (looking the wrong way), and that's the core advice he gave me. To get out of this mess and invest in our industry's future - you've got to have forward looking vision. He said, "... Peter it's all about timing, maybe next week you come across a half dozen of them, the changing landscape needs to get one of those forward looking Generals to think and then Bingo!"
We need more Generals who are looking to fight the next war and not the last one for our industry to turn around.
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