Daymond John

JOHN: I was asked to do various speaking engagements and panels when I first started FUBU. I noticed when I spoke at larger corporations, they would take a couple of key things I had said, hire a young African-American or a minority from the mail room and say, “Alright, we’re appointing you to be somebody in the marketing department or somebody else.” Then those people would not necessarily do the best job, so corporate leadership would say, “Well Daymond, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” As a result, I said, “I don’t need to do this anymore” and shied away from speaking for a while.

At a certain point though I decided to write books because I realized that what I had been saying on stage was not being transcribed like it is today and/or I needed to put something down where people understood exactly what I was saying and the methods on how I say you can accomplish this, whether in my world, or in your world.

As I started doing books and promoting them, I went on shows like Donny Deutsch and MSNBC and I saw that there was this need – this audience of everyday people who felt they wanted to make it, and they just needed a little bit of information. People would say, “Thank you for empowering me. I want to become the CEO”, or “I want to move up in my organization” or “I want to think outside the box.”

I then got picked up by Shark Tank because of my work speaking on these panels and TV shows, and that made me realize that there was a much bigger world. I thought of people who want to become entrepreneurs, and be empowered. Likewise, corporations want to empower their people to think outside the box; they don’t want people who are just doing exactly what they say because that doesn’t lead to growth especially when times are changing so quickly.

So, I started getting requests. Once I pivoted my presentation from telling one company how they should brand their product to instead, telling them how they should brand and educate their people, I started to get joy out of it. I started to see the CEOs and CMOs, and people that worked at the companies come to me and tell me how it was working. It was opening up their eyes to how they could empower themselves personally, as well as their employees.

Now, I work on my speaking every single day, because if somebody entrusts me with their message for the most valuable asset in their company – their people – I really have to think about how I deliver that. It’s an honor and a big responsibility, and I love everything about it.

JOHN: I always wrap it around my story because I never want to insult the professors and experts out there. I tell them why things have worked for me, and then I attach it to what I think are the most important takeaways:

1. You have to set a goal. If you don’t set goals, then you don’t know what direction to go in.

2. Do your homework. Whatever situation you’re in today has happened before. Maybe it has happened in a different way, maybe the technology wasn’t the same, maybe the product wasn’t the same, but it happened. How can you apply that information to what you’re doing?

3. Ask yourself: are you loving what you’re doing? And if you’re not loving what you’re doing, are you loving what the results are and who you’re doing it for? I worked at Red Lobster for five years while I was doing FUBU. I didn’t necessarily love Red Lobster, but I loved the fact that I was able to do FUBU at night, or in the day, while I did Red Lobster at night. I was using that as the base to fuel my company and my company kept growing. I didn’t love being a waiter and serving shrimp to a bunch of strangers, but I did love the fact that I had medical, the ability to pay my mortgage, and I was able to live a decent life without the old entrepreneurial saying, “Burn everything, and just go hard” – a piece of advice that can leave you with absolutely nothing.

4. You have to take personal responsibility for who you are. You may think that, “I work at IBM, and IBM needs to take responsibility,” but actually you need to take even more responsibility now because you are representing IBM. You’re an extension of a bigger brand, and you’re your personal brand as well. At the end of the day, the buck stops at you. Responsibility is something that must be taken, it can’t be given.

5. My story is no different than anybody else’s. Everybody has had a bunch of brick walls in their way. We’ve all fallen, been hurt, been scared, but you just kept swimming. If you take ego and embarrassment out, and you add all these things that have gotten you to where you are today, you’ll realize how powerful of a person you are. You just have to keep swimming, but you have to do so with affordable steps, because I don’t want somebody to hear me, quit their job and run crazy.

Put everything together that I said, and either way – whether you become successful or whether you leave it all on the field and you know you tried your damnedest – you’ll be proud of yourself.

JOHN: An audience that’s open for change, only. I’ve spoken to so many people, from HR to everyday entrepreneurs at Chambers of Commerce to large corporations.

I make sure that I customize it for the exact group that I’m speaking to because I put myself in their position, whether I’m speaking to other fellow business owners like myself, who are right in the middle, and they’re pivoting. They don’t know if they’re going to scale or they don’t know if they’re going to close up shop.

Or I’m talking to kids who are in college like when I was a young man, and I didn’t know where I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, and there was so many different pieces of information coming to me.

Or I’m speaking to a corporation like myself and I need to figure out how do I energize my 50 employees to think outside the box, feel like there’s no glass ceiling, bring me all the greatest and brightest ideas, feel like they’re going to partake in the uptick of it and the growth, and more importantly, feel like they’re going to be acknowledged for their contribution.

So I put myself in all those positions.

JOHN: About three months ago, I got to the venue and the crowd was about 7,000 people. I had just seen Bohemian Rhapsody, and I was so impressed with the movie, not knowing that much about Queen, even though hearing them from time to time. At the end I started singing “We are the Champions” – “I’ve paid my dues, time after time” – and the crowd, a bunch of entrepreneurs, joined in and we sang the whole song together. It was the largest karaoke that I’ve ever seen. My voice was cracking and so was everybody else’s, but we just had a really good time and it was so improv that I’ll remember it forever.