Appetite for Investing Millions

Now that Fall is here and we are all trying to make the best out of it I have to say that the road has more curves than ever... this 2012 is giving me more headaches than I was expecting, but still when the rain goes the sun comes and that is when I come in.

With full force training almost everyday and living a life that fulfills my needs another article again and on the search of 5 Million Euro in less than 5 years that´s why we are all here right? I want to share the experience of one of my youth heroes Mr. Duff McKagan In 1994, Duff McKagan's pancreas exploded. The former Guns N' Roses bass player says years of drug and alcohol abuse caused the rupture, which left him sidelined for months. As he recovered from the incident at home and sobered up, he found himself with hours of free time and little to do. 

McKagan wandered into his basement one day and came across a file cabinet containing GnR's financials from the previous six years. While thumbing through the reports, he realized he had no idea what they meant. Then, he panicked.

"I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't know how much we had made or lost on the tour," McKagan recalls. "As a 30 year-old millionaire, how do I admit to somebody that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing?"

Now, 17 years later, McKagan is starting his own wealth management firm for musicians. The company, called Meridian Rock, will be headed by McKagan and Andy Bottomley, a British investor. Their goal is to educate rockers about their finances instead of pandering or lying to them -- no small feat in the music world, where businessmen, a.k.a. "suits," are often seen as the enemy.

McKagan, 47, says his epiphany in 1994 was a wakeup call. He enrolled in a basic finance course at Santa Monica Community College, which he says gave him a hunger for academia. McKagan moved to Seattle four years later and signed up for more classes at a local community college. "It took me twice as long as an 18- or 19-year old just out of high school to do the homework, but I got through it," he says. By the time he was accepted into in Seattle University's Albers School of Business, McKagan had become actively involved in managing his portfolio, which included everything from stocks and mutual funds to property.

A few months into his last year of business school, McKagan, who had left Guns N' Roses in the late 90's, formed a new rock supergroup, called Velvet Revolver. The band -- which also included GnR's Slash and Scott Weiland, the singer from the Stone Temple Pilots -- was a surprise hit. Velvet Revolver's album debuted at No. 1, and McKagan took a hiatus from business school to go on tour (he is still one semester short of graduating). When Velvet Revolver broke up a few years later, he played a short stint with the band Jane's Addiction, and then fronted his own outfit, Duff McKagan's Loaded.

It was around that time, McKagan says, that word started spreading that he knew something about managing money. He began getting regular calls from musician friends with questions about everything from whether to buy a house to where they should invest their money.Though McKagan has spoken publicly about the business of music and authored a column in Playboy on finance ("Duffonomics"), he is quick to downplay his investing expertise.

"I'm not a financial planner -- I was just trying to figure this out for myself," he says. "I didn't want to be 60 years old and broke, having made all this money in my twenties...that was my simple goal."

How to be a Rocker and a Money Manager

But the mere fact that his friends were looking for advice from a guy with just a few years of schooling under his belt led him to have another epiphany. Most rock stars know nothing about their finances. Some don't want to know -- but others are kept in the dark, or are too self-conscious to ask simple questions. And yet, they were comfortable talking about money matters with McKagan, who was one of their own -- so what if he could bridge the gap between the musicians and stocks?

About a year and a half ago, McKagan met Andy Bottomley, a former banker who says his early stage venture firm, Imprimatur Capital, counts investors like Paul Tudor Jones' Tudor Investment Corp. Bottomley is a music aficionado (he counts indie acts Sonic Youth and Sebadoh among his favorites) and the two hit it off immediately, so much so that they decided to form Meridian Rock together. Though the company is still in its early stages -- McKagan and Bottomley are currently interviewing money managers in both Europe and the U.S. -- it has won industry backers like Peter Asher, the former A&R man for the Beatles' Apple Records and producer of several James Taylor records.

There are already scores of wealth managers, both at small boutique firms and large bulge bracket banks, who cater to high net worth individuals like musicians. What makes Meridian Rock different, McKagan says, is its understanding of the industry.

For example, he says, most bankers overestimate the "window" in which music acts are guaranteed income, which he places at three to five years. The musicians themselves are equally clueless, he adds. "You think the money is going to keep coming," he says. "When you get that big contract, or your record goes platinum and you're selling out concerts, you don't see that it's going to end."Anyone who's ever seen Behind the Music or Cribs knows that rock stars aren't generally frugal creatures. But they are rarely told, in blunt terms, when they need to cut back, which is one reason why so many go into debt.

"A lot of business managers and attorneys are nurturing that, saying, 'You're the greatest, this is never going to end, the next album is going to be greater,'" says Rick Canny, who manages McKagan's band. "A manager's responsibility is not to tell you, 'In a couple years, you're done.' That's the best way to lose a client."

Musicians tend to surround themselves with intermediaries who make their financial decisions for them. McKagan says Meridian Rock's advisers will talk directly to the talent, in plain and simple terms. The company's three tenets, he notes, are righteousness (i.e., not screwing people over), transparency, and education.

While he admits that not all rockers will be interested in the service, he believes that many want to learn more about finance, but are afraid to admit how little they understand."If they're anything like me when I was thirty, they're too embarrassed to ask," he says. "I didn't know what a stock was, what a bond was." Today, McKagan knows a great deal -- and he has an appetite for Investing just like me so welcome to the Jungle baby it´s time to Invest!

To Make Millions It's More Important to Be Kind than Clever

It seems that everything is happening all at once, and the idea that when you are ready it comes feels better than ever, finally I have some time this month to go back and fully train and exercise and it feels so good to be back while still on my purpose of One Million Euros in lees than 5 years  lately I have been enjoying my little ones more than anything we only live once so let´s do it all,  yesterday I found a story over the Internet that involves a young man, his dying grandmother, and a bowl of clam chowder from Panera Bread. It's a little story that offers big lessons about service, brands, and the human side of business — a story that underscores why efficiency should never come at the expense of humanity.

The story, as told in AdWeek, goes like this: Brandon Cook, from Wilton, New Hampshire, was visiting his grandmother in the hospital. Terribly ill with cancer, she complained to her grandson that she desperately wanted a bowl of soup, and that the hospital's soup was inedible (she used saltier language). If only she could get a bowl of her favorite clam chowder from Panera Bread! Trouble was, Panera only sells clam chowder on Friday. So Brandon called the nearby Panera and talked to store manager Suzanne Fortier. Not only did Sue make clam chowder specially for Brandon's grandmother, she included a box of cookies as a gift from the staff.

It was a small act of kindness that would not normally make headlines. Except that Brandon told the story on his Facebook page, and Brandon's mother, Gail Cook, retold the story on Panera's fan page. The rest, as they say, is social-media history. Gail's post generated 500,000 (and counting) "likes" and more than 22,000 comments on Panera's Facebook page. Panera, meanwhile, got something that no amount of traditional advertising can buy — a genuine sense of affiliation and appreciation from customers around the world.

Marketing types have latched on to this story as an example of the power of social media and "virtual word-of-mouth" to boost a company's reputation. But I see the reaction to Sue Fortier's gesture as an example of something else — the hunger among customers, employees, and all of us to engage with companies on more than just euro terms. In a world that is being reshaped by the relentless advance of technology, what stands out are acts of compassion and connection that remind us what it really means to be human.

As I read the story of Brandon and his grandmother, I thought back to a lecture delivered two years ago by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, to the graduating seniors of Princeton University. Bezos is nothing if not a master of technology — he has built his company, and his fortune, on the rise of the Internet and his own intellect. But he spoke that day not about computing power or brainpower, but about his grandmother — and what he learned when he made her cry.

Even as a 10-year-old boy, it turns out, Bezos had a steel-trap mind and a passion for crunching numbers. During a summer road trip with his grandparents, young Jeff got fed up with his grandmother's smoking in the car — and decided to do something about it. From the backseat, he calculated how many cigarettes per day his grandmother smoked, how many puffs she took per cigarette, the health risk of each puff, and announced to her with great fanfare, "You've taken nine years off your life!"

Bezos's calculations may have been accurate — but the reaction was not what he expected. His grandmother burst into tears. His grandfather pulled the car off to the side of the road and asked young Jeff to step out. And then his grandfather taught a lesson that this now-billionaire decided to share the with the Class of 2010: "My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, 'Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.'"

That's a lesson I wish more businesspeople understood — a lesson that is reinforced by the reaction to this simple act of kindness at Panera Bread. Indeed, I experienced something similar this past week, and found it striking enough to devote another blog post to the experience. I can just say by now that a couple of extraordinary (and truly human) gestures have come to me and they have  won my loyalty.

"What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind?" I asked at the time. "And what kind of businesspeople have we become when small acts of kindness feel so rare?"

That's what's really striking about the Panera Bread story — not that Suzanne Fortier went out of her way to do something nice for a sick grandmother, but that her simple gesture attracted such global attention and acclaim.

So by all means, encourage your people to embrace technology, get great at business analytics, and otherwise ramp up the efficiency of everything they do. But just make sure all their efficiency doesn't come at the expense of their humanity. Small gestures can send big signals about who we are, what we care about, and why people should want to affiliate with us. It's harder (and more important) to be kind than clever.