Creel Price is a guy that’s done a lot. Like, a lot.
He was the Australian captain in the World Elephant Polo Championships, has climbed several of the world’s highest mountains, been dubbed, “the living, breathing definition of an entrepreneur” by Sir Richard Branson (just casually) and, to put it plainly, made a hell of a lot of money.
Having been entrepreneurial for as long as humanly possible (he started eight businesses in high school and two more in uni), things really kicked into gear when he co-founded Blueprint Management Group with Trevor Folsom, a bloke he had worked and backpacked with prior.
“We started with $5,000 each in capital, and up until the time that we sold it, we had put no more money into the company – not for want of trying”, Creel told PEDESTRIAN.TV in our latest Founders University podcast.
We were able to exit in 2008 for 109 million dollars. We increased the company to about 1,000 people and there were quite a few different areas of the business – we had a big core centre business, a financial advice business, and a data business.
Securing their first big client was when things really kicked into gear, but the story of how they pulled it off is truly incredible/hilarious.
When we first started, we started with such a small amount of capital. We had a really crappy office because we stretched our budget to have a city-based office, but we didn’t have decent furniture – we paid $100 bucks for our furniture at one of those second-hand auctions.
We all of a sudden got an opportunity to pitch to some of the executives at Westpac, so we went down to their office with what must have been a pretty good pitch. A small company trying to do business with a big company was pretty rare – we had a lot of rejection up until that point – but then this executive at Westpac stood up and said, ‘look, this is exactly what we need’, which was music to our ears. He then went on to say, ‘the problem is, we need to start right away’.
They then said they’d come out the following day to check out Creel’s operation – and having had past deals not pan out due to the state of their office – they were pretty concerned. With just $3,000 left in the bank they hired plants, computer monitors, boardroom furniture, and even friends/family for the day to make them look like a bigger operation than they actually were. Then, someone had the bright idea to break into the office next door and put the boardroom furniture in there to make them appear like an even more pieced together operation. It was enough to seal the deal.
While juggling what seems like an incomprehensible amount of projects these days, Creel is still passionate about what he’s called the ‘Entreprenaissance‘.
The reason why I retired was so that I could start this Entreprenaissance.
The Entreprenaissance is all about how do we get more entrepreneurs into business, how they can be successful in business, and more entrepreneurs using businesses with social values.
Folks, we’ve barely scratched the surface on Creel’s story/advice for game business people. In the latest episode of our Founders University podcast, he goes into more detail about why bootstrapping is better than capital, why you need to find your magic metric of measurement, how the propaganda around coding is a bit overkill, why entrepreneurship skills need to be taught in schools, why you should look beyond the typical hubs of investment and much, much, more. Take things to the next level in your life by having a listen to the below:
