ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Kenneth Lord, founder and CEO of Tru Leadership Institute.
“Grow your vision” is a fitting motto for Tru Leadership Institute, as it’s a company dedicated to holding seminars where prospective entrepreneurs can hear from, meet and engage with industry leaders.
Not only did Lord establish Tru Leadership Institute, but he’s actually the founder of seven privately-held companies. When asked to elaborate on how he’s been able to pull that off, Lord’s advice to Corie centered on brevity.
“One of the things that my late wife taught me was that you start a company — and so let’s just say you set up a corporation or a company — and through establishing that, there’s a time frame. So, there’s a time frame to start that company, you’re going to fill out the paperwork, then the government or state’s going to do something. Well, in that interim, you start a second company, and then that paperwork and all those pieces are going to be in process, and then you start a third company, and within about 90 days or so, you’ll have three companies starting to create momentum,” he said. “The whole idea around building businesses, in my mind, is you want one client or one amount of money that’s going to pay for your entire month’s amount that you need, if you could establish that, and one of the things we’ll also talk about is looking at things from the greatest impact or result that you can achieve in the shortest amount of time with the fewest number of steps.”
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In line with Lord’s advice on achieving much greatness with the fewest number of steps, he told Corie about the effectiveness of focus.
“If you just pause and focus on those fewest number of steps, just put all your time and energy into those things and achieve them, you can achieve great things. An example of this would be years ago, I had an organization called Africa As One and the goal at that moment was to raise money so that we can achieve some great things in the world, right? And we were in contact with the sixth-largest PR firm in southern California, and what I was doing when I was talking with them is I said, ‘I need to have lunch with this person,’ and they said, ‘No problem, it’ll be this much money and I’ll get you a lunch with that person,’ for instance, right? And that luncheon could have changed the trajectory of our organization; it was the fewest number of steps to achieve the greatest results,” Lord said.
When it comes to running his companies however, Lord says his dialogue differs slightly from most founders and CEOs in terms of appealing to investors. Rather than asking for that money first and laying the foundation later, Lord suggests you do things the other way around.
“Through that process, what I realized is that most of them were focusing on raising a certain amount of capital, and that’s what they wanted,” Lord said. “(…)If it’s all you, then it’s all about your vision, it’s all about what your big plan is and the only stress is you fulfilling what you set out to achieve. My take on that is that you want to build business credit, you want to build your personal credit up, get business funding and build your business credit so you can get business funding so you’re fundable. You’re building the fundability and then once you get going and you’re starting to generate $30-, $40-, $50,000 a month and you got a good momentum, that’s when — if you want to get funding — you’re not only going to be less likely to give more of a percentage (of equity) that you would normally want to give anyways, (you’re also) less desperate and more really drawing to you those investors who see the bigger vision that you’ve already established.”
Hear the full interview and more in Season 5, Episode 9 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.
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