How Mark Cuban and Daymond John Went From Pups To Sharks

Mark Cuban and Daymond John are two business experts who are most famously known as “sharks” on the hit ABC series Shark Tank. They share a similar background of being men who built their wealth from the ground up.

 Photo courtesy of ABC

Mark Cuban is a self-made billionaire with an estimated worth of $3.2 billion dollars. While most people know him as the owner of the NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks or from his appearances on Shark Tank, Cuban’s business portfolio dates back to when he was a little boy. At the age of 12, Cuban was going door to door selling garbage bags to save money to buy a pair of sneakers he wanted. His big break came in 1990 when he created MicroSolutions, a computer consulting service that he later sold to CompuServe for $6 million dollars. His bigger break came in 1995 when he and a friend wanted to listen to the Indiana Hoosier’s basketball games in Texas. They created Broadcast.com in order to listen to the games in Texas. Four years later Cuban and his friend sold the company to Yahoo for $5.6 billion dollars.

 Photo courtesy of ABC

Daymond John is a self-made millionaire with an estimated worth of $300 million dollars. John, like Cuban, got his entrepreneurial start at a very young age. At the age of 6, John was selling pencils at school, shoveling snow in the winter and raking leaves in the fall. His first break came in 1992 when he launched a clothing line in his mother’s living room. The clothing line was called FUBU, an acronym which stands for “for us by us.”  He sold the items in and around his Queens, New York neighborhood, but he couldn’t keep up with demand. His mother took out a second mortgage on her home to fund his dream. Everything changed in 1997 when LL Cool J, a rapper from Queens, New York, wore a FUBU hat and slipped FUBU into the rhyme of a Gap commercial he was featured in. Both LL Cool and John hail from Queens, New York. LL wanted to look out for his fellow native New Yorker, much like others had looked out for him. He wore the FUBU hat in the commercial and recited the lines:

G-A-P gritty

Ready to go

For Us By Us on the low

“G” that’s for getting it

A for always

P that’s power

After the success of FUBU, John went on to see success as an author, motivational speaker, a shark on Shark Tank as well as serve on President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative.

Each expert is looking for something different from a business plan. John is looking for a plan on how one intends to brand their product or service. He said, “branding is the most important part of a successful business plan, even if the plan is to do something that has already been done.” This is critical because there are very few “brand new” ideas. There are many ideas that build upon or take something away from a previous idea or creation, so you have to brand and market yours to stand out from the rest. Cuban is looking at a few areas of the business plan. He wants a business plan that will show if there is a need for the product or service, is there a market for it and he wants to see a well developed and produced business plan. This will let him know if the business is something he wants to invest his money in. Cuban wants to ensure that his personal investment and his personal brand are not going to be tainted by an idea or a creator who did not have their business plan properly developed. Losing money is not an issue for him, but he does care about his reputation in the business world. When seeking money from an investor the decisions made by the creator of the idea can impact everyone involved.

Daymond John’s viewpoint on branding is the viewpoint I need to focus on for my plan. There are many crisis management firms in the United States and in the world. I have to brand my company in a way that makes it stand out from everyone else.

References:

Articlebio. (n.d.). Daymond John biography. Retrieved from http://articlebio.com/daymond-john

Expert Views on Business Plans. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://bpexpertviews.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-07-02T08:44:00-07:00&max-results=7

Forbes (n.d.). #527 Mark Cuban. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-cuban/

Lee, Ellen (2012, August 7). How FUBU founder Daymond John conquered urban fashion. Retrieved from http://www.cnbc.com/id/48535056

Mark Cuban Companies. (n.d.). Company website. www.markcubancompanies.com