Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Walt Disney Business Ideas

Having good ideas doesn’t create guaranteed business success. At some point Experience becomes irrelevant, Accomplishments becomes everything.

Success is based on action.

Consider Walt Disney:
Walt dropped out of high school. He was kicked out of the army. He got fired from his first newspaper job for "not being creative enough." The real problem was that his creativity was stifled in those environment.

Occasionally something completely outside your control will cause you to fail. Most of the time, though, it's you. And that's okay. Every successful person has failed. Numerous times. Most of them have failed a lot more often than you. That's why they're successful now.
 
So, Walt struck out on his own. His early animations were a HUGE success with the public.

But Walt didn’t know how to manage money … and his business went bankrupt within two years.

In his second business attempt, he got the money management figured out by hiring someone else to handle that.

But this time he failed to secure legal rights to his creations. A business partner stole his cartoons…and his team of animators. Ouch!

Poor Walt was broke again.

Walt Disney didn't invent the cartoon. But he did ask, "Why are cartoons always only three minutes long?" He realized that with the right story, you could engage an audience with animation for just as long as you could with live actors

The point is if you can think, you can innovate. If you can ask "why?" you can change the world. Let other people do the hard work of figuring out how to make cars greener.

You can be the one who asks "Why?" You can hire people to figure out the how

Walt Disney’s third attempt to start an animation studio finally found success. But it didn’t come easy. Walt’s big dream was to create the first ever full-length animated motion picture.

Hollywood insiders ridiculed the idea as "Disney’s Folly." They said it would be the end of Disney Studios. They were almost right.

Disney started making Snow White in 1934, during the height of the Great Depression.

His studio ran out of money in 1937 and had to halt production with the film 90% finished.

But Walt refused to give up.

Think about the type of people you want to work with. Think about the types of customers you would enjoy serving. Think about the friends you want to have.

Then change what you do so you can start attracting those people. Hardworking people want to work with hardworking people. Kind people like to associate with kind people

First he mortgaged his home. Then he cobbled together a rough cut of the movie. Finally he gathered together a group of investors.

He gave them a private viewing of his unfinished masterpiece in a last-ditch effort to save the film. The persistence paid off. Walt secured his loans, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at Christmas time of 1937.

The public adored the movie and Disney made over $8 million in its initial release. That’s the equivalent of $122 million USD in today’s money.

The movie had only cost Disney $1.08 million to produce. Walt paid off all his loans, gave his animators a great bonus and expanded his studio. The rest is history.

Embrace every failure: Own it, learn from it, and take full responsibility for making sure that next time, things will turn out differently. Successful people are naturally drawn to successful people.


I Wish You Great Success