World’s Richest Man Jeff Bezos Needed an Urgent $3.1 Billion for his Personal Use Last Week
Amazon the company he founded and runs has $41.25 billion in cash at its disposal.
A typical Nigerian business man that has that kind of money would have called his accountant on phone and tell him to raise $3 billion urgently for him and the accountant would do as Oga said.
But the truth is that Jeff is not permitted to do that or behave like an average Nigerian business man since Amazon is a a publicly quoted well structured business rather what he did is that he called his stockbroker and then inform him that he wants to raise $3.1 billion urgently for his personal use and wants to sell shares worth that value immediately in order to raise the money.
That instructions was carried out, the shares were sold, money wired to his account and he did his filling with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the country where he lives as he was required by law.
. The sales this week bring his total cash out in 2020 to slightly more than $7.2 billion so far. He still owns more than 54 million shares, worth more than $170 billion, making him the richest person in the world.
Now this is the reason why I shared this: Jeff Bezos with his example is teaching my generation of entrepreneurs how to run a structured business.
Your company’s revenue is not your money and not for you to spend as you wish.
Dear CEO! Put yourself on salary, cultivate the habit of sharing some part of your profit at the end of the year and then inject the rest back into the business.
You can list your company when it scales to a big company on Nigeria stock exchange and then anytime you need urgent cash, instead of dipping your hands on the company’s revenue like our parents did or are doing, you can quickly dispose some of your shares and raise the money you need.
This is how to run a healthy profitable business.
A business that outlast the founder and one that can flourish more than 100 years.
Dangote is one of the few entrepreneurs that runs his business this way in this part of the world and I hope my generation of entrepreneurs are paying attention.
