Paul Tran is the founder of Point B Capital Corporation, a globally diversified company with subsidiaries in franchising, business advisory, private investment, and financial planning services. He has been involved in corporate banking, real estate, restaurant ownership; and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Smart Money, CNN, and other business and financial media. He writes articles and blogs on personal and business matters at http://www.paulttran.com
Projects that he is currently working on include growing a healthy fast food chain in Southern California; working on concept development for an innovative dessert company (partially for business, more for his insatiable sweet tooth); looking for retail real estate in Orange County to open Halloween costume stores; and helping 13 restaurant chains grow an additional 100 stores this year. He’s also learning to live the 4-Hour Work Week (although it doesn’t seem like it) and growing his company by hiring virtual assistants and building a sales team.
Oh, and planning his Summer wedding (that’s important).
Q: Do you think the education you’ve invested in helped you on the road to success?
110%. Education IS success…actually, let me correct myself – Education is potential success; APPLIED education is success. Learning is earning. It doesn’t matter if you went to Harvard, your local community college, or dropped out – because there are billionaires, millionaires, and fulfilled people in each of those quadrants. Those are only vehicles to learning – the learning itself happens when you kick the pavement and fall on the floor and get back up.
I’ve studied marketing at California State University, Long Beach; have bought and got lost in hundreds of books; attended many seminars focused on sales, marketing, business, and personal development; and I’ve learned through my career and my entrepreneurial activities in owning/running restaurants, raising capital for investments, Ebay, you name it. I have a Ph. D in the school of hard knocks. Sad there’s no designation for that =)
Q: What was the “breaking point” in your career that made you decide to build your own brand?
There were a few incidents, actually:
- Social Media leveled the playing field for small enterprises with limited budgets to compete with the billion-dollar marketing budgets of large companies; you’d be crazy not to take advantage of the medium
- Through my business and sales experience, I’ve found that when I ask clients why they do business with me, their first response is that they love the products and service I provide, but the deal-closer was their pleasure in interacting with ME; I had to leverage that and build my brand
- Ever since I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and had my life turned up side down, I’ve decided to always do the unconventional thing. You really can’t expect to go to school, get a good-paying job and expect to be rich, successful, and fulfilled; you need to be contrarian, a risk-taker, do the different thing so that you can get the different result. That made me jump jobs and learn instead of stay in my comfort zone; start up companies; and through my unusual projects, I’ve continued to attract unusual opportunities. Law of Attraction at work, I guess
I had to get over fear of the unknown – I still do struggle with that from time to time, but I realize not everything can be calculated or analyzed completely. Some of the best ideas that have changed the game for us were never “proven” or had “precedent” – like NetFlix, Google, the Internet, Social Media, and the list goes on. Some of my best decisions were made because of passion, determination, and gut instincts – something I need to take advantage more of.
I overcome failure by failing. Sounds a bit counterintuitive, but how else will you learn unless you know what doesn’t work? How will you know what doesn’t work unless you execute? You only have 2 results – either your actions take you to a huge win, or you fail and find how to win the next time around.
The faster way to success it to fail often!
I also overcome failure by having a supportive network of colleagues, mentors, and coaches. You need to fail in order to win, but you shouldn’t make EVERY mistake in the world – that’s a full-time job – so I learn from the experiences of people who I aspire to be who have done it before, positive and supportive friends who give me an outsiders point of view, and my business coach helps put things into perspective.
Q: Can you tell us of an interesting story from your professional life? (an embarrassing moment may be).
Hmmmm…where do I start, hah!
I am a clumsy person in general, but I don’t have any specific stories that I can share that come to mind right now.
Maybe an interesting fact about me is that although I consult for restaurants and owned my own restaurant…I don’t really know how to cook. And I think my restaurant did successfully because I stayed out of it, and hired the right management in place to do what I couldn’t do. And when I advise restaurant chains and franchise owners – the fact that I don’t know how to cook is a good validation of the franchise business model – where you don’t need to be a chef to run a good chain of food service establishments. All you need is the passion, the energy, excitement, love of the industry, and a good team.
Q: As a young professional, what were some of the mistakes that you made and what did you learn?
Although being passionate about people and ideas is more important than many things needed to succeed in business – it’s also blinded me as well. Being too excited has made me minimize tangible, business-killing obstacles. I’ve partnered up with people who I later realized were not good people to do business with – but I was too pumped up about opportunities to see that. I have jumped into ventures without listening to my gut instincts or advisors.
But for the most part, my passion is steered me more right than wrong. It’s the fuel. Just make sure it’s refined and high-quality fuel =)
Q: How do you measure success?
I measure success not by customer satisfaction surveys – I measure success in client referrals and repeat sales.
I measure success by not how much money I make, but how many opportunities I create (how many jobs I’ve created by helping clients build businesses; how much more I can contribute to charities I care about; if I’m forced to hire more people, I’ve improved someone’s economy).
I also measure success by how much free time I have to do what I want to do. Time freedom is my currency.
Q: What is one advice that you can offer to your readers?
Do it for the love. Do it for something much larger than yourself. Make decisions – not promises. Don’t ever stop learning. Execute your ideas and your passions, regardless of whether you think it’s right or wrong – you’ll find out for sure that way. Money is a horrible way of keeping score. Take care of your health – you’ll need as much energy and stamina needed to do all you want to do. Get a coach or mentor – there is no such thing as a self-made millionaire.
Q: What do you do for fun?
I sing, read books, watch movies, write, start companies, advise companies, exercise, playing with my tiny Pomeranian Mr. Big, spend time with the fiancée, travel, find new places to eat on the weekends
Q: What is your favorite 1) gadget(s), 2) software(s), 3) website(s) that makes your life easier and more productive?
Gadgets: My Dell laptop, iPod, BlackBerry Curve (yeah, I’m old school like that)
Softwares: Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Ace of Sales, Salesforce
Websites: Seth Godin’s blog, Mint, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tim Ferriss’ blog
Q: Whom would you like to see featured here and why?
Neal Schaffer – Wrote the Amazon best-selling book “Maximizing Linkedin” – 1 of the LinkedIn’s most connected people, he’s a social media advisor and speaker for companies, and a dear friend of mine. He’s helped me on my pathway to success. His email is nealschaffer@gmail.com and his web site is nealschaffer.
Dean Soto – Wrote the wildly popular ebook “Building Your Business With Virtual Assistants” – he is a dear friend of mine, a very successful business person, and blogs about how to run your business more effectively. I’m a client of his, and he’s helped me manage my business tasks and time, introduced effective technology that has streamlined/automated many of my operations, and he’s definitely someone you want to know and interview. His email is dean@prosulum.com
Ways to Connect with you:
Facebook: paulttran
Twitter: paulttran
LinkedIn: paulttran
Website: www.paulttran.com
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