Door Number 101
John Paul DeJoria came home from work one evening, twenty-two years old, to find his wife on her way down the stairs with the car keys already in her hand. She told him she needed to run to the store. By the time he made it upstairs, she wasn't coming back. In the middle of their small living room sat their two-year-old son, a pile of DeJoria's own clothes stacked beside him, and a note saying she couldn't handle being a mother anymore, and that the boy would do better off with his father.
She had already cleaned out what little they had in the bank and hadn't paid rent or the utilities in three months, pocketing that money too. DeJoria had almost nothing on him, and his last paycheck wouldn't arrive for another week. The eviction notice came the next day. He found an old Cadillac with a broken water pump, which required him to pour water in it every four hours just to keep it running, and it became home for him and his son. He spent his days collecting soda bottles out of vacant lots and cashing them in at Coke and 7 Up machines, trading them in for a few cents apiece, until a friend offered him a spare room to work his way back on his feet.
The years after that looked and felt like recovery. DeJoria built an actual career in the beauty industry, working his way up to national manager at one company and running training and education at another. But something kept happening along the way. He got fired, more than once, for reasons that had nothing to do with how well he did the job. One company let him go after he complained they were testing products on animals. Another fired him because he cared more about keeping his sales team off the road for weeks at a stretch than about the company's travel budget. At a third company, after he tripled their annual sales in a single year, he asked to trade half his commission for a small stake in the business instead. They told him no and reminded him he was already making more than the owner. He left that one on his own.
By the time DeJoria decided to start something of his own with a hairdresser friend named Paul Mitchell, he'd already been homeless once and fired three times for essentially the same reasons. Most people who'd been through that much instability would want a sure thing this time around. So they lined one up. A hair care company built properly needed serious money, half a million dollars, and a contact at a bank had an investor lined up to provide it. The plan was set. All that was left was to go collect the check.
The money never showed up. It was 1980; American hostages were still being held in Iran, gas lines stretched around blocks, inflation was pushing 12 percent, and the investor pulled out. DeJoria had already left the newer car with his wife and children and driven the older one down the hill to collect funds that no longer existed. He was homeless again, sleeping in that car while trying to build a company that didn't technically exist yet either.
Most people in that position would have waited for confirmed funding before launching anything. DeJoria and Mitchell didn't wait. Mitchell was the hairdresser, DeJoria was the businessman and formulator, and between the two of them they had seven hundred dollars, part of it borrowed from DeJoria's mother. They told their bottle maker, their silk screener, and their bottle filler that they only needed a small sample run, ten thousand bottles instead of the hundred thousand they actually wanted eventually, and paid what little they could up front. DeJoria loaded the finished bottles into his car and drove up and down Ventura Boulevard, salon to salon, selling it himself.
When one distributor told him it wasn't worth the time to build an unknown line, DeJoria didn't argue with him. He'd already spent a week knocking on salon doors and came back with twelve signed orders and twelve checks, the payee line left blank on every one. He laid them out on the desk and said the distributor's name just needed to go on that top line, since the first twelve customers were already sitting right there. The distributor laughed and took the account.
Decades later, after building two companies each worth billions, DeJoria still won't use email. Every business he's involved with keeps a fax machine running for one purpose: reaching him directly. He carries a phone book older than some of his employees, filled in with whiteout and rewrites, because he'd rather call someone back himself or answer a letter on the same page it arrived on than let a message sit in an inbox somewhere. It's the same instinct that got him through three years of door-to-door encyclopedia sales long before any of this, back when a trainer told him the people who actually make it are the ones who stay just as ready on door number one hundred and one as they were on the first one, even after a hundred doors in a row have already closed on them. He believed it then, and still does.
Sources
• John Paul DeJoria Transcript, The Tim Ferriss Show — https://tim.blog/2020/06/20/john-paul-dejoria-transcript/
• John Paul DeJoria, Forbes Profile — https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-paul-dejoria/
• How John Paul DeJoria Went From Homeless To A Billionaire In New Doc ‘Good Fortune,’ Forbes —
