At age 21, Solomon RC Ali was running a maintenance company which happened to be his first business. However, his lack of knowledge in accounts receivables threatened the survival of his business. He had spent all his money on materials and equipment without necessarily thinking about how he was going to pay his workers.
“I had all these people working for me and a couple of trucks. Now it was time to pay all these people. I owed out $148,000. I had about $15 in the bank account, but I was owed half a million dollars. I just didn’t have the infrastructure in place to collect it,” he said. The business could not survive due to financial constraints.
Ali picked up the pieces and soon, he was successfully running nursing homes in Los Angeles which turned him into a millionaire. However, his failure to keep good records and also insulate himself from the finances of the business collapsed his second venture.
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Ali admits his failure to take up lessons in sound financial management and proper record keeping contributed to the collapse of his business. He recently revealed that he was so shaken by the collapse of his business that he contemplated taking his own life because he knew he had no one to blame but himself.
Just like many entrepreneurs who go through series of failures before hitting gold, he took his failures in his stride and rebounded by assisting to arrange capital for companies to monetize their intellectual property while earning a commission.
He established Solomon RC Ali Corporation, which offers business management consulting and arranges capital in exchange for an equity stake. The company has invested in technology inventions like RING Doorbell, bank text messages to clients, among others.
According to Ali, his strategy is to invest in startups that have potential and then take them public. “We go out, we expand technology, we develop it out and we monetize it. We invest primarily in companies that are private, and we take them public,” he said.
Ali said he operates his business in strict adherence to “The Rockefeller Method,” which he described as one of the most effective business strategies on earth. He explained that he has been able to build $100 million companies and above and created just under a billion dollars in assets using the ‘Rockefeller Method.’
“Life is not hard. Life is about making the right decisions. How do you make the right decisions? You have to get the right knowledge and information from the right people,” the private equity investor and CEO said.
