One Million Frogs - Softcover

Power, Rhett; Peter Gasca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634139070 ISBN 13: 9781634139076

Publisher: Mill City Press, Inc, 2016

Synopsis

Amazon #1 Best-Seller

In 2007, Rhett Power and Peter Gasca resigned from lucrative consulting jobs with tremendous professional freedom to start their first company together, Wild Creations. Just a year later, the worst economic recession in a generation paralyzed the global economy. In the face of overwhelming odds, and in true entrepreneurial form, Power and Gasca were able to persevere with a great deal of creativity, common sense, and, ultimately, sheer determination.

Within two years, Wild Creations grew to be recognized by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce as the fastest-growing company in the state and by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the U.S.

Through One Million Frogs, Gasca and Power hope to provide other aspiring entrepreneurs with validation and inspiration, using the knowledge they gained in growing a highly successful business of their own in one of the most tumultuous times in a generation.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Gasca is from Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended Arizona State University and earned a degree in Construction Project Management. After spending half a decade in real estatedevelopment and homebuilding, he moved to Washington,D.C., where he received his MBA from Georgetown University,with an emphasis in Finance and Strategy. He then moved to Central Asia as a volunteer with Pyxera Global (formerly the MBA Enterprise Corps), and ended up staying to work as a business development consultant for USAID before moving to South Carolina to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams with Wild Creations. He currently serves as an advisor for Startup.SC andas an Executive in Residence at Coastal Carolina University. Peter and his wife, Flyura, have two children, Christopher and Amina, and live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Rhett Power is from Charleston, South Carolina, where he attended the Citadel and University of South Carolina. After an early career in politics, radio and public relations, he sold all of his worldly possessions and joined The United States Peace Corps, shipping off to Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Following The Peace Corps where he taught business and current affairs at Bukhara State University, he stayed in the region and worked with USAID as a business development consultant before returning to his home state to start Wild Creations. Currently Rhett writes for Inc. and Success Magazines on management, leadership and entrepreneurship. He just finished a second book which will be published by McGraw-Hill in January 2017. Rhett and his wife, Julia, a U.S. diplomat, have two boys Max and William, and for the moment live in Washington D.C. 

From the Back Cover

THE ULTIMATE TEST OF YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL ABILITY IS THIS: DO YOU SIMPLY HAVE THE CONFIDENCE TO TRY?

All entrepreneurs share a unique drive and insatiable curiosity that is the foundation upon which they start businesses, build legacies, and have a lasting impact on theworld. Rhett Power and Peter Gasca shared this ambition, which in 2007 led them toresign from lucrative consulting jobs with tremendous professional freedom to start their first company together, Wild Creations.

Just a year later, the worst economic recession in a generation, the Great Recession, paralyzed the global economy and caused many business owners tofold. In the face of overwhelming odds and in true entrepreneurial form, Power and Gasca were able to persevere with a great deal of creativity, common sense, and,ultimately, sheer determination.

Within two years, Wild Creations grew to be recognized by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce as the fastest-growing company in the state and by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the U.S.

If you ask ten successful entrepreneurs for the secret to success, you will receive twenty unique stories. One Million Frogs is one of these stories. It is through this story that Gasca and Power hope to provide other aspiring entrepreneurs with validation and inspiration through the knowledge they gained in growing a highly successful business of their own in one of the most tumultuous times in a generation.

PETER GASCA and RHETT POWER are co-founders of Wild Creations, a specialty toy company,which has won over 40 national awards for itsproducts. Both authors contribute regularly at Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com and are often featured as business experts in Business Insider, The HuffingtonPost, Time, and Success.com.

From the Inside Flap

One Million Frogs

Our entrepreneurial story plays out the way most do: an idea conceived over watered-down Russian beer and flatbread pizza at a quaint Georgian restaurant high in the cool mountains of Kazakhstan. It pinnacled with the company we founded, Wild Creations, being recognized as one of Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest growing private businesses in the US and the number one fastest growing business in South Carolina.

The root of our success: frogs.

We'd like to say that it all went as planned. Nothing, however,went as planned. For starters, our original vision of running alarge multinational investment holdings company turned into wrangling frogs and making toys. The transition, of course, was an interesting one and most certainly did not happen overnight.

Along the way, there was more pizza and probably too much beer, mortars in Afghanistan, more miles than most people drive in five lifetimes, cheap hotels with fleas, pilfered toilet paper, extreme government agencies and extremer special interest groups, guns and police, endless trade show pitches and tubes of lip balm,and more than one lonely Christmas season spent at a mall kiosk bartering live frogs.

Okay, so maybe that is not the way most startups go.

It is not, however, as different as you might think. If you replace allof that history with the underlying themes that encouraged them,you will find commonalities. Belt tightening, stress management, risk taking, dedication and long hours, innovative thinking, thriftiness, interpersonal skill development, conflict resolution, hard work, salesmanship, and unending personal sacrifice.

If you ask ten successful entrepreneurs for the secret to success,you will receive twenty unique stories and more than a fair share of clichés. And while most will not involve dodging live ordnance in Afghanistan or frogs, all will share these same themes.

This book is one of those stories.

It's about two regular guys who for years worked in comfortable consulting jobs in "Corporate America," with job security, comfortable paychecks and the freedom to fill numerous passport pages, but who had unfulfilled and conflicting ambitions. It's about our entrepreneurial journey, from our catalysts to taking action through the most significant economic crisis in a generation, and rising from the bowels of complete failure and mediocrity to sitting with John Lasseter, the founder of Pixar, at the Academy Awards of Toys. All with an improbable frog company.

This book is filled with stories, anecdotes and, yes, a few clichés,but the genesis behind it all was to provide other aspiring entrepreneurs a set of our hard-knock lessons to guide them to their entrepreneurial dreams. Most stories involve mistakes we made along the way that were sometimes avoidable and always expensive. We hope to impart wisdom through what was ourcollective ignorance.

We understand completely that most aspiring entrepreneurs whoread this book will eventually make the same mistakes we have. We are, after all, natural risk takers and universally inquisitive. Entrepreneurs are the type of people who burn themselves onthe frying pan because we just had to see "what if." That natural curiosity is what encourages them to venture out and start businesses, build legacies, and leave their marks in this life.

So the greater intent of this book, to a certain extent, is to provide you with validation and inspiration.

The fears and anxieties you have are common. True, some people have more tolerance for risk and, hence, are more inclined to be entrepreneurs, but this book will provide evidence that you don'thave to be Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson to start a business.

All you need is a little common sense, courage, and persistence. Not necessarily in that order.

And when you fail -- and you will, often -- we hope the stories and anecdotes in this book will serve to provide you with not onlythe tips to help you be successful, but also the moral support youneed to persevere.

You are not alone in your ambition. The first step is the most difficult. Read on and you will come to understand why entrepre-neurial success cannot be defined by a single adjective or cliché, but instead only by the embodiment of a complete narrative of another entrepreneur's successes and, more important, persever-ance through all the hard times.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mill City Press, Inc
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1634139070
• ISBN 13: 9781634139076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178