The Peebles Principles

R. Donahue Peebles with J.P. Faber
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
April 2007;$24.95US/ 29.99CAN; 978-0-470-09930-8

At the tender age of nineteen, Donahue Peebles entered the business jungle with no resources beyond his native smarts, a decent education, and a powerful drive to succeed. Seven years later he became a multimillionaire. Today, with a net worth of more than a quarter-billion dollars, he commands a real estate empire stretching from the boulevards of Washington, D.C., to the sparkling beaches of Miami Beach to the glitzy strips of Las Vegas. How did this determined young entrepreneur achieve such spectacular success so quickly? Can others learn his secrets and emulate his accomplishments? Can you?

Part The Art of the Deal and part Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun, The Peebles Principles distills the lessons Mr. Peebles has learned on his journey from congressional page to CEO of the largest Black-owned real estate development firm in the nation. These crisp, straightforward principles can help any motivated entrepreneur go from dirt poor to filthy rich in a hurry.

In entertaining first-person accounts of his most important deals, Mr. Peebles reveals how each transaction required him to find new resources within himself to ensure its success. Through this process, he discovered valuable principles that would aid him in all of his future endeavors. Some lessons are motivational and inspirational; many are hardball business how-to's that apply in any industry and any type of transaction.

Key Peebles Principles include: 

• Make your money going into the deal
• Control of the deal is more important than cash
• Being lucky means being ready
• If the key doesn't fit, change the lock
• Be a bulldog on details
• Listen to your first instinct
• Respond quickly to attacks
• Find out what the other side really wants and give it to them
• Turn vinegar into wine; setbacks are opportunities in disguise
• Seeing value is everything
• Be the last man standing

Colorful and detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of each transaction provide a real-world business context for each principle and show you how to apply them in practice.

Complete with a unique discussion of the importance of politics in business and how to make it work in your favor, The Peebles Principles is the indispensable resource for anyone eager to turn dreams of business success into reality very, very fast. 

Reviews
"Don Peebles is an example of what entrepreneurs are all about. In this engaging and witty book, Peebles shares insights from his own success in the world of high-powered real estate. What makes this book different is Peebles doesn't just focus on the positive, he discusses the failures too -- something every entrepreneur can expect in his journey to success. This book should be on every aspiring business person's bookshelf to be read again and again."
--Robert L. Johnson, Founder, BET and Owner, Charlotte Bobcats

"The Peebles Principles provides a fun read and a bird's-eye view of the ever-changing world of a real estate entrepreneur. It is a good gut check for would-be entrepreneurs to ask if they have what it takes."
--Dr. Peter D. Linnemann, Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

"Wow! What a magnificent inspiration The Peebles Principles is for anyone seeking to be involved in business. The ground rules found in each chapter are absolute gems, and those alone make the book worth buying."
--Cathy Hughes, Founder and Chairperson, Radio One, Inc.

"This book is a brilliant example of entrepreneurship, creativity, and principles. Peebles walks you through many of his successful deals, from their inception to their completion. Once you start the book you won't be able to put it down until you've finished the last page."
--Dr. Sanford L. Ziff, Founder and Chairman, Sunglass Hut International Inc.

Prologue

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I came from what most people would describe as a middle class home, an only child in a one-parent household. But by the time I was twenty-seven I was a multimillionaire, and by the time I was forty-five I was worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

This book is the story of how I created that wealth, beginning with nothing. It is also a book about how to get rich, following the principles I learned over more than two decades of building my personal fortune. It is the breakdown of the deals that created that fortune and how I won those deals. It is a handbook of tales and tactics for a twenty-first-century entrepreneur.

Perhaps not everybody wants to get rich, but I would say that this particular desire is somewhere close to the core of the American dream. I know that I wanted to be rich when I was young. I wanted to achieve a financial stability that would free me from the worries over money that I experienced growing up. I wanted to leave that field of gravity forever.

My dream came true with my first big deal, when I was twenty-seven, which turned me into a multimillionaire. I have since consummated deals that dwarf my first win, but I have never had that same feeling.

I remember that day vividly, when I signed a letter of intent with the city of Washington, DC, to develop an office building on Martin Luther King Avenue. The bricks and mortar were still to come, but that document meant I would own half of a multimillion-dollar project and would be receiving a mid-six-figure income annually for decades to come.

When I returned to my apartment, at about 8 o’clock, a group of my friends were there. To celebrate, my girlfriend had gotten a cake from the Watergate Bakery, a white chocolate mousse cake, and a few bottles of champagne. It was a moment worthy of celebration, a breakthrough moment, the biggest event of my business career to date. It meant that my financial future was set from that moment on. I could quit right there if I wanted to; making a half million a year was more than I’d ever envisioned as a kid, when I was a teenager living with my mother and helping her make ends meet.

That night, lying in bed, I thought about it all. I thought back to how I was so impressed in high school when I learned that Walt Frazier was making $300,000 a year playing basketball. I’d wished that one day I could do that, and here I was, on my way to making more than that. It was just such a sense of relief. I was done. I didn’t have to do another thing except make sure the construction company actually built the building. What a great moment.

It was more than just the money, too. In that moment I was vindicated: The road that I had taken -- to quit college after one year, to forgo the pursuit of a medical career in favor of real estate -- had proven to be the correct one. The risks had paid off. As I lay in bed I even calculated how many years I would have been in medical school, followed by an internship and residency. At that point I would have been in my first year of internship, struggling financially. Now, with one deal, I was going to make more money each year than top doctors.

It was a bigger moment for me, perhaps, than someone from another background. I did not come from poverty or ignorance, but neither did I come from affluence, the kind that allows children to enjoy a sense of indifference about money. My mother and I had been on our own since she and my father divorced when I was five years old. Although my father was gainfully employed as a government clerk and auto mechanic, he never supported us. My mother did that, through a variety of jobs in the industry that I would end up choosing: real estate. She worked variously as a secretary, a broker and a mid level executive at Fannie Mae. We lived mostly in and around Washington, D.C., with a couple of years in Detroit, and our fortunes went up and down as her career changed. We did very well in Detroit, for example, when she had her own real estate brokerage. Later, when we moved back to Washington, she was a secretary again, and again we had to worry about money.

My point is that from the age of 13 on I was aware of our financial limitations, about being able to afford the necessities of rent, groceries and school clothes, and from that age on I wanted to make sure I could avoid those same worries when I became an adult. Fortunately, my mother was a very bright woman. Both she and the other members of my extended family -- especially my grandfather, a hotel doorman who sent four of his five daughters to college -- believed there were no limitations to what I could achieve in life. They gave me a great sense of self-confidence and ambition, and did the sorts of things, like my mother teaching me to play chess when I was in grammar school, that pay off so handsomely in later years.

This book is not an autobiography, however, except to the extent that such information helps readers understand that I entered the economic jungle with no resources beyond my native smarts, a decent education and a good family background. This book is rather about the methodology of creating success and wealth and an explication of those methods.

I know I have had my fair share of good fortune, and I am thankful for it. But I believe the principles that guided me are principles that can help anyone to achieve success. I don’t believe you need to be born with any special advantages, or any special instincts, other than a basic amount of intelligence and a drive to succeed.

I have written this book to share my principles with those who also aspire to make something of their lives in this land of opportunity called America. I do a lot of public speaking, and what I try above all to convey is the idea that the number-one challenge of the entrepreneur is belief. If you believe in yourself, and believe that anything is possible, then the road to success is wide open.

What follows in this book are the deals that took me from a wage earner to a world shaker, from a single man in a tiny apartment to a happily married man with a loving family and a substantial fortune. I learned something from each one of the deals I describe, as I hope you will. While the profession I chose was real estate, I believe that the same principles apply to any entrepreneurial endeavor.

Many people will say you have to be lucky to get rich, and I agree. But understand that luck, as a dear friend and mentor once told me, is "where opportunity and preparation merge." This is the kind of luck required to be a successful entrepreneur. My hope is that this book will give you the principles you need to prepare for the opportunities that will undoubtedly cross your path.

Good luck to you all. May the next big deal be yours.

Copyright © 2007 R. Donahue Peebles

Author:
R. Donahue Peebles is Chairman and CEO of The Peebles Corporation. He is a recognized leader in real estate development and entrepreneurship, with a portfolio that includes four-star hotels and luxury residential and commercial properties in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Miami Beach. He is also Chairman of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. He and his projects have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, Inc., USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Black Enterprise, Washington Business Journal, and South Florida CEO magazine, along with many other prestigious local, national, and international publications. He has been profiled on CNBC and CNN Financial Network, and has been a guest on Bloomberg radio and the Tom Joyner Morning Show. He and his company have received many regional and national awards in recognition of their entrepreneurial success, including the 2004 Black Enterprise Company of the Year award.

For more information, please visit www.peeblescorp.com