Ron Baker – Have Your Skin in the Game

BIO: Ron Baker is the founder of VeraSage Institute—the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally. He’s also a radio talk-show host of The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy on Voice America. STORY: Ron partnered with a group of friends and invested $70,000 to start a software company. All the partners had no experience or skills to run the business leading to its failure. LEARNING: Seek out successful people and try to learn from them. Learn from your losses.   “When it comes to business, you’ve got to have your total skin in the game.”Ron Baker  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ronbaker1/ (Ron Baker) started his CPA career in 1984 with KPMG’s Private Business Advisory Services in San Francisco. Today, he is the founder of https://www.verasage.com/ (VeraSage Institute)—the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally—a radio talk-show host on Voice America; the show is The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy. Ron has authored seven best-selling books, including https://amzn.to/3ITZKhj (The Firm of the Future); https://amzn.to/3O3VXP7 (Pricing on Purpose); https://amzn.to/3Pa0YHo (Measure What Matters to Customers); and https://amzn.to/3c4uXBO (Implementing Value Pricing). His forthcoming book, https://amzn.to/3uP8Dmt (Time’s Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms), will be published in November 2022. Worst investment everRon partnered with a couple of friends and started a software company. He invested about $70,000 into the company. The group wanted to write a software program to help firms value price. They hired a software engineer and spent a lot of money to get the program going. They were all delusional and believed they were sitting on top of something radical and innovative. Their most significant setback was their lack of skills and experience in building a software company. All the partners also had other jobs and were treating business as a side-hustle, not payin