When I was a young man of 22 traveling through Turkey, I picked up a copy of Newsweek magazine. In its pages, I came across an article describing the extraordinary life and conservation efforts of two Americans, actor William Holden and his best friend, Don Hunt. The picture alongside the article showed the two of them running through the tall grass of Kenya chasing a cheetah. The article described their life at the Mount Kenya Safari Club and their vision for it. It was 1969. Most of my friends were serving in the Armed Forces, several of whom in Vietnam. A couple of them had been killed in action. I felt lucky to be declared 4F as a result of a serious football injury, but I felt a certain sense of responsibility to use this reprieve for doing something wonderful with my life. I took the Newsweek article as a sign. I decided to go to work for William Holden and Don Hunt in East Africa.
That is when I discovered personal power AND the power of a good idea.
On my own account, I traveled to Kenya and spent the next four months studying every detail of these two men's lives-their businesses and their private concerns. Holden was a big star (academy award winner, leading man to most of the beautiful ladies of the day) and a very successful businessman with media interests as far away as Hong Kong. Don Hunt was (and still is) a self-made excellent businessman with a passion for saving endangered wildlife, which he does with great results using his own money. So after four months of learning everything I could about these two guys, I called Don Hunt to make an appointment to see him, to make him an offer he couldn't refuse-to hire me! (William Holden was away on location filming Wild Bunch.) Calling Hunt from the remote area of Lake Baringo in Kenya to Nanyuki, where the Mount Kenya Safari Club is located, required the use of a radio. That meant keying the microphone and saying, "Over," after each complete thought. The conversation was very awkward, as you can imagine. But basically because I knew the action I wanted (a meeting), and because I had thought out my proposition, I got that meeting to be held precisely at noon about three weeks from the date of the call.
The meeting was to be a lunch held at Don Hunt's home at the Mount Kenya Game Ranch in the foothills of Mt. Kenya itself. A couple of problems arose before the meeting: I was based in the outskirts of Nairobi (150 miles from the appointed meeting place), I didn't have a car, and I didn't have a suit. As soon as I got back from safari, I went into Nairobi and convinced a tailor to make me a khaki suit for $50. I borrowed a club tie and white dress shirt from my host who was a British colonel in the Kings African Rifles. As for the problem of the lack of a car, I decided to hitchhike!
The day of the meeting, I got up at 4AM and set out at 6AM in my new suit for Nanyuki. Six rides and six hours later, I arrived, without a resume, at the Mount Kenya Safari Club where I was taken to the exquisite bungalow of Don Hunt. Two Swiss partners in the club and their beautiful wives also attended the lunch. The scene was reminiscent of the south of France. The lunch served was exquisite.
After lunch, the other guests left, and Don suggested we have coffee on the veranda.
His first question to me was: "How can I help you?"
My answer: "I'd like to come to work for you."
His answer: "We don't have anything."
My response: "Well, what about 'x,' which I have been learning about, or 'y,' which so and so told me about? Or, what about 'z?' All these things are projects you are working on, and I think I could learn and make a difference. I have been studying these projects and have an idea of how I can help you make these projects work even better."
His next question: "How did you come to know about those things?"
My response: "You don't understand, Mr. Hunt. I have come 12,000 miles from my home in Atherton, California to work for you. I am passionately interested in your enterprises. I want to work for you. If you give me the opportunity, I will work hard for you."
The meeting went on from there. We spoke for several hours. His telling me stories about their work in East Africa, visions for international wildlife preservation's, documentary films in the making; my telling stories about my family and growing up. Finally it was getting dark. He wrapped-up the conversation by setting another meeting in Nairobi in two weeks time. Meanwhile, he invited me to stay the night at the Club. Now, I must say this was a tempting offer, the Club being one of the prettiest I'd ever seen, but I turned him down, saying I had business in Nairobi the following day that required me to return that night. He then offered to walk me to my car! I told him I had hitchhiked and that if he would be so kind as to drop me on the Nanyuki-Kenya road, I would find my way back to Nairobi just fine, which I did.
Following the next meeting, he had me fly in a private plane to a cheetah capture operation 800 miles away in Somalia, where he had arranged for me to meet his Somali friends and a white hunter who introduced me to what was to become my favorite of all cats ? the cheetah. A week later, he flew up and said, "So, what can you do for me?" I replied with a specific reference of things I could do to improve the operation in Somalia. Being that it was my first job, the list was pretty small: I spoke Italian, ran a small business in college, learned well, and would work very hard to increase his company's position in Somalia. On the other hand, I pointed out there was the matter of catching Cheetah! He said he would have the Kenya-born white hunter teach me that part. We agreed on the salary and terms, and we shook hands. I got the job. Then, for the first and only time, he said, "Oh, yes. Can you send me and my company in the US your resume and three references for our records?" I returned home, got married, and after a little training, headed back to Africa.
By the way, I found out later that literally three thousand people who had read the Newsweek article had written Holden and Hunt asking for jobs and sent resumes, but I was the only one who had traveled the distance to Kenya to meet them - and remarkably the only person to propose a new idea of how I could help them become even more successful
Within five months, I was on safari in the Horn of Africa with Holden and Hunt, catching wild animals in Somali in a relocation effort. I was a long way from home, and it was my first job, but I loved it. I worked for them for six years, sometimes catching cheetah in Somalia, other times working closer to home, building drive-through safari parks for the likes of Warner Brothers. It was a great time in my life, during which, I enjoyed many wonderful adventures and began my career.
Getting my first job was the end of the beginning. However, I kept using personal power to create all sorts of wonderful opportunities in my job - I learned to use my personal power to cross boundaries of function, technology, hierarchical business and geography to create new business opportunities for my employers. I became a "marketeer." I used personal power to learn about the world in new ways, even to get accepted to Oxford University. Through all this, I sort of threw away the rule book about what was possible. I learned that business, whether it is the business of developing your career or the business of living, is personal. I learned that people commit themselves to other people, not to organizations. I learned that to be successful in anything, you have to commit to make a proposition to go forward and go the distance yourself.
At the same time, I also figured out something important was missing something I wouldn't learn until I was 37 years old from a Saudi Arabian, who is one of the best marketers on Earth, in another one of those prettiest places on Earth.
That is when I discovered the power of the 1-Page Proposal.
Fast-forward 15 years after starting my career, when I was a 37-year old businessman, and Adnan Khashoggi, one of the richest men in the world, invited me to Monte Carlo to join him aboard his yacht to discuss a business proposition my company had presented to him a few months earlier. I had met Khashoggi some time before at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, where a mutual friend introduced us. Khashoggi is a uniquely personable and gracious man. I enjoyed him immensely and admired his obvious success in international business. I was looking forward to doing business with him, but in Monaco two years later, getting around to business took awhile. I was his guest at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco for nearly a week as I awaited my turn in his schedule. While Khashoggi was busy hosting numerous guests from the King of Jordan to actress Brooke Shields, I was spending my days at Cap d'Antibes and other glorious spots along the French Riviera. This was the kind of waiting I could have gotten used to. Finally, my time to meet with him came at 1AM. I was summoned to meet Khashoggi on his yacht in the Monte Carlo harbor.
I was prepared for an in-depth discussion of the elaborate business plan my brother and I had sent to him a few months earlier concerning our company's activities in the Horn of Africa. I was expecting him to ask detailed questions about the intricacies of our proposal, which concerned an equipment dealership I wanted to develop as a joint venture. But, he had other ideas. Instead, he said, "I want to teach you how to write something very important ? a 1-Page Proposal."
Those few words put me on alert; obviously, I had made some kind of mistake with my business plan. At first, I was shocked. Like most businessmen, I was trained to be thorough, meticulous, and detailed in my presentations. I hadn't expected my 50-page proposal could have been too much; but here was a clear sign that it was. I wondered if this was this my cue to thank him for his time and leave?
Apparently not. Not only was Khashoggi not pushing me out the door, he couldn't have been friendlier, and it was apparent that he was in earnest; he really wanted me to understand what he was trying to say. I listened as Khashoggi continued, "The 1-Page Proposal has been one of the keys to my business success, and it can be invaluable to you, too. Few decision-makers can ever afford to read more than one page when deciding if they are interested in a deal or not. This is even truer for people of a different culture or language."
I could hardly miss the message. The proposal I had prepared was not suited for a man like Khashoggi-not because it lacked thoroughness, but because it lacked brevity! Following common practice, our original proposal was divided into sections-Company, Business, Risk Factors, Markets, Capitalization, Financial, Management, Recent Events, Legal, and References-and included dozens of appropriate diagrams, charts, and maps. 50 pages, which is short by conventional business-plan standards, would just take our target audience too long to digest.
Our proposal had failed to deliver our idea in a way that enabled Khashoggi to act, and that was a pity, as he explained, because he wanted to. He was motivated to act on our behalf for several reasons-he already had business dealings in the region, he liked us and our general idea, and, of course, he had the money. (According to his biographer, at that time Khashoggi had direct investments in 1,500 enterprises and was earning $200,000 a day from his un-invested capital.) He had been ready to move forward until our elaborate, overwrought proposal had given him second thoughts and had frustrated his ability to make a decision. By the time I met with him, he had passed it along to lower-level advisors for evaluation.
Yet Adnan Khashoggi was thoughtful enough to take time to advise me on how to improve my chances. And so, for several hours in the middle of that night, aboard the most beautiful yacht in the world, one of the world's wealthiest men carefully laid out for me the essence of writing a business proposal that a business person like him could read, digest, and act on immediately. For him, the answer was a 1-Page Proposal that described in the simplest form the entire structure of the deal and what he was being asked to do. I realized Khashoggi knew what he was talking about, for he himself had successfully made similar proposals to kings, presidents, and the CEOs of the largest multinational corporations on Earth.
In two hours, he became a teacher as well as a friend. I left his company enriched at about 3AM and returned home to San Francisco with a wonderful, secret gift.
The secret I learned from Khashoggi that night has since brought me revenues of over 10 million dollars. I have used the principle he suggested to me to advance my business interests at home and overseas, using my own 1-Page Proposal format to develop business ventures in the United States and Japan and even to advance some private interests of my family.
Even though I felt evangelical about it, I had kept the secret of the 1-Page Proposal to myself for years, even as I used it as a private working practice and key element of my business style to get jobs. I even improved on it after carefully studying famous 1-Page Proposals in history, from the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence to the Arecibo Interstellar Message sent into deep space. Then, a good friend and publishing mogul Judith Regan encouraged me and eventually published the secrets of the 1-page proposal in a book of the same name under her imprint Regan Books at Harper Collins. At that point, the word was out, and in spite of no publicity or marketing, the secret methodology of the 1-Page Proposal was spreading around the world with translations in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. I started to get inquiries everyday from around the world by people of all ages using the 1-page proposal in a thousand different ways ? many, many of them to get jobs.
