Page 51 - Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

rebuilding my business. Then the next problem appeared: beating my low-
priced competitors, and the imitators who took my product and were

making money while I was losing money.
This problem came in the form of pirates. The very people who copied
my first product, the original nylon wallet, were now copying my
competitive niche. They started producing the same licensed products I was

producing, selling at lower prices, only not paying a royalty to the bands.
After a few months of fighting the pirates, I realized the only people
getting rich were my attorneys who were charging me to fight them in court
but not winning. The pirates were smarter and quicker than my attorneys.

All my attorneys could tell me was that they needed more money to fight. It
didn’t take me long to realize I was just paying another group of pirates,
and these pirates (my attorneys) were supposed to be on my side. I was
learning another valuable lesson in business and money, which will be

covered in the next chapter—financial IQ #2: protecting your money.
There is a saying that goes, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Tired of
hemorrhaging money in a losing battle, I fired my attorneys and flew to
Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia to join forces with the pirates. Instead of

fighting them in court, which was costing me much more money than I was
making, I licensed my competitors to produce my wallets for me. My
production costs dropped, my legal fees went down, and I had better
factories behind me. I could now do what I did best—sell. Business boomed

again. Soon our products were in department stores and at rock concerts. In
1982, a new television network hit the airwaves, MTV. Our business went
through the roof and, once again, money poured in.
In January of 1984, I sold my share of the rock and roll nylon wallet

business to my two partners. Kim and I left Hawaii and moved to California
to start our business education company. I had no idea there would be such
a difference between selling a product and selling education. Nineteen
eighty-five was the worst year of our lives. Our savings ran out, and soon

the problem of not enough money was a major one. I’d been broke before,
but Kim hadn’t. That she stayed with me is a testament to her character—
not my good looks. Yet, we worked together and built an international
business teaching entrepreneurship and investing with offices in the U.S.,

Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Canada. In 1994, Kim and I sold