“A great manager, a great entrepreneur, is able to distinguish, 24 hours a day, even while you’re sleeping, the difference between the signal and the noise,” O’Leary told the crowd.
According to a release from Miami officials, who invited O’Leary as part of its acclaimed “Farmer School of Business Anderson Distinguished Lecture Series, he explained “every day, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have a mandate. You have to achieve a certain goal.”
“Maybe you have to double sales in the next year. Maybe you have to do something about cutting costs. Maybe you’ve got to set up new social media campaigns. There’s always something you have to do, and you’ve got to get it done,” he told the audience, which was comprised mostly of Miami students.
“That is the signal,” O’Leary said. “Everything else around you is the noise, the stuff coming at you on social media, the phone call you don’t have to take, the party you shouldn’t go to because you’re not finished at work yet.”
Jokingly dubbed “Mr. Wonderful” over the years for his blunt, straight-forward treatment of entrepreneurs on Shark Tank, O’Leary’s appearance at Miami is the school’s latest connection to the TV show.
In 2021, two graduates of Miami’s Farmer School of Business starred on the show and won a half-million-dollar investment from O’Leary’s fellow show panelist and businessman Mark Cuban for their start up “Mad Rabbit” company.
And in 2022 a Shark Tank broadcast featured a follow up segment on the two entrepreneurs and their company’s now national success.
O’Leary also shared his view on a positive way the Covid pandemic’s onset in March 2020 changed the American and world economies for the better in some ways.
“People ask me, Why is the stock market at all-time highs today? Because America has changed. It’s more efficient, it’s more productive, and it’s more profitable,” O’Leary said.
“100 million people got hip to their phones. They started using every app they’d never used before, in every service imaginable. And many services started to grow in the middle of the pandemic, many great entrepreneurial companies were started then in the chaos of a basement, when people can’t even go outside, and 100 million new customers were born online in nine months, an extraordinary change.”
“There wasn’t any middleman anymore. You’re making your product and shipping it right to the customer, and your (profit) margins went from 50 cents to sometimes as high as 82 cents. Margins exploded because direct to consumer models also exploded.”
He said there are three things that all successful entrepreneur pitches have in common: The ability to communicate the opportunity in 90 seconds or less; being able to convince investors that they lead the right team execute the business plan and knowing their (business) numbers and having a comprehensive understanding of their business model.
“You get all three of these right, your chances of getting funding go up geometrically on Shark Tank and everywhere else on Earth.”
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