Mike McCarthy is the founder of McCarthy Capital, an Omaha-based private equity firm. Prior to the 2010 Young Professionals Summit, Joe Olsen of Phenomblue sat down with Mike to talk about business skills, entrepreneurship, and more.
Here’s a quick synopsis of the interview:
- We only learned to look for skills later on in the process – started out with very non-traditional skills
- Looking for people with a passion for what they do
- Looking for a product that has a wide audience and big market
- The right people, with the right product, in the right markets – the numbers take care of themselves
- Basic entrepreneurship rule: DNROC (do not run out of cash)
- There’s no specific attributes which make people successful by background
- Looking for people with a knowledge base, with a passion, and that can manage
- Takes more courage than sense to start a business
- We don’t value failure high enough in Nebraska
- Culturally we need to get beyond whether we’re going to fail and spend more focus on whether we’re going to get started
- Core strength that people don’t focus on: generating revenue
- When building a team: look for differences rather than similarities
- If you can only have two people, you better have one that can sell and one that can produce
- Shared success is as important as shared wealth – investors want to be a part of successful ideas and successful businesses
- The people with the most humility tend to end up with the most money
- ADD is a big problem for entrepreneurs – lack of focus can be a great strength and a great weakness
- Foundation of Omaha and of the country is entrepreneurs
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