As the cover story for the January 1999 issue of SUCCESS MAGAZINE, Dell shared the secret of how he built his billion-dollar empire.

Michael Dell was speaking to an entrepreneurship class at the University of Texas business school when a bold student stood up and asked the young multi-billionaire why he still kept going to work. “You’ve got so much money,” he blurted. “Why don’t you just sell out, buy a boat and sail off to the Caribbean?” Dell stared at him and said, “Sailing’s boring. Do you have any idea how much fun it is to run a billion-dollar company?”

Few people could actually answer that question. But more important than the answer is what Dell’s question reveals about the founder and CEO of Dell Computer Corp. and how this mega-entrepreneur was able to achieve so much, so fast. In 1984, Dell started his company with $1,000 and the premise that he could beat his competitors by building computers to order and selling them directly to consumers. It was a simple, radical idea, and it shook the computer world to its foundation. Fourteen years later, Dell’s direct model guides an estimated $18 billion global corporation.

How did he do it? By keeping his mind fi rmly focused on doing business as opposed to making money. Walk into the hushed executive suite at Dell Computer Corp.’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, and you’ll see a man standing behind a podium desk, both absorbed in and invigorated by his work. Michael Dell’s office has chairs only for visitors. Dell works standing, appropriately enough for the CEO of a manufacturing company that has slashed inventory turnover to an astonishing seven days, compared with 80 days or more for much of his competition. (In the computer industry, inventory loses 1 percent of its value every week that it sits on the shelf; Dell’s world-beating inventory management is thus critical to the company’s bottom line.)

Society expects visionaries and innovators to be eccentric. Consequently, Michael Del l ’s sheer normality is a bit deceiving. To put it mildly, Dell is not a wild or crazy guy. He is dark, soft-spoken and reasonably handsome, with the slightly puffy look of one who puts in long hours running a multibillion- dollar company. He lives in an enormous house in Austin Hill Country, guards the privacy of his wife, Susan, and their four young children and gives generously to various charities. He is not especially keen on small talk; his only discernible quirk is that he is particular about his neckties—or so say sources close to Dell.

It’s easy to marvel at Dell’s success, but it’s more important to understand the strategy that took him from the dorm room to the executive suite. When he talks about his beginnings as a University of Texas computer wonk, you realize that it all started with the basic entrepreneurial act of spotting a market niche. “At the root of it, I was probably just opportunistic,” Dell says. “I had and still have a great interest in computers. There was a business opportunity [with] this product that I really liked, and it all kind of lined up together.

“I saw that you’d buy a PC for about $3,000, and inside that PC was about $600 worth of parts,” he continues. “IBM would buy most of these parts from other companies, assemble them, and sell the computer to a dealer for $2,000. Then the dealer, who knew very little about selling or supporting computers, would sell it for $3,000, which was even more outrageous.”

The Power of “Mass Customization”
When asked whether he understood at 19 how he was revolutionizing the marketplace, Dell responds, “Well, we started the company by building to the customer’s order. And, interestingly enough, we didn’t do it because we saw some massive paradigm in the future. Basically, we just didn’t have any capital (to mass produce).”

So Dell caught a lucky break in the beginning, but he hardly abandoned his business model once he got a few nickels together. Instead, he expanded it on a mass scale, using information technology to customize millions of computers individually. Today, business pundits have anointed “mass customization” the industrial paradigm of the next century, just as mass production was the paradigm of the 20th century. And while many companies are turning to mass customization (anybody can now order made-to measure jeans from Levi-Strauss or a personalized car from BMW), Dell’s brilliant and, more important, consistent, execution of this model sets the computer apart from the crowd.

One hundred years ago, Thomas Alva Edison told SUCCESS magazine that the first requisite of success was the ability to concentrate on a single problem. “If you get up at 7 and go to bed at 11, you have put in 16 good hours, and it is certain with most men that they have been doing something all the time,” Edison said. “The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things, and I do it about one.” Dell and Edison are kindred spirits in this regard. For the past 14 years, Michael Dell has concentrated on building better computers and selling them at a lower price. While he may not be a world-altering inventor like Edison, Dell has managed to reinvent his industry, build a world-class company, and enrich thousands of employees and shareholders along with himself. For a 33-year-old college dropout, that’s not too shabby.

Thank You SUCCESS.

That dream of an Olympic championship is in the heart of every amateur athlete, just as the Grand Final, World Cup, Super Bowl and Wimbledon are the goals of professional football players and tennis players. What are your dreams? You’re most likely not a world-class athlete, but surely you have aspirations of your own. Perhaps you imagine a metaphorical gold medal being placed around your neck by the CEO of your company or by your friends and family for being the best in your own unique way. Maybe you wonder whether you’re up to the risk of starting your own business.

On Sundays, my grandparents would take us children to ride the huge merry-go-round next to the San Diego Zoo. We could hardly wait to mount those bobbing zebras, lions, tigers and stallions, and whirl round and round to the music of the antique pipe organ. Surrounded by mirrors and lights, our hearts would pound in anticipation as we stretched out desperately, trying to be the one among all the riders who would grab the gold ring and win another ride. So began my competitive spirit.

Since you’re probably younger than I am, you may never even have heard of grabbing the gold ring on the carousel. But in the 40s, and 50s, if you reached out and caught it, you not only got a free ride—your name was also announced over the loudspeaker and all the other kids and their parents would applaud. And, of course, the kids all wished it could have been them instead of you.

Reflecting now on my youth, I’ve come to some realizations. I guess I did start out thinking of success and winning as something that you got by reaching outside yourself and proving to others that you were worthy. Come to think of it, most of my friends also believed that you had to prove or earn or win or perform in some special way, and then you would deserve the gold ring or the Olympic gold medal.

The approval of others seemed to precede feelings of self-confidence and self-worth. You were entitled to feel good about yourself only after you performed well. Why did it take me so many years to discover that just the reverse ought to be true?

After devoting most of my lifetime to investigating the wellsprings of personal and professional success, I’m able to make the following statements with great confidence:

• You need to feel love inside yourself before you can offer it to anyone else.
• Your own sense of value determines the quality of your performance. Performance is only a reflection of internal worth, not a measure of it.
• The less you try to impress, the more impressive you are.
• What you show the world on the outside is a mirror image of how you feel on the inside.
• You should chase your passion, not your pension.

The key trait shared by athletic champions and winners in every walk of life is the fundamental belief in one’s own internal value. 

If your success depends on external possessions, you’ll be subject to constant anxiety. When your peer group cheers one of your accomplishments, you’ll feel good for a while, but then you’ll wonder if they’ll cheer as loudly the next time. If they’re critical, you will feel hurt and threatened. The truth is, you can never win over a long period if your concept of success depends upon the perfect performance or the placing of a gold medal around your neck.

It’s obvious that talent, looks and other attributes aren’t equally distributed, but we’re all given an abundance of value—more than we could use in several lifetimes. The game of life certainly isn’t played on a level playing field for each of us in terms of education, a supportive home life and other circumstances beyond our control, but I can assure you that you were born with the qualities of a champion. That’s what I mean by value.

You see, champions are born, but they can be unmade by their perceptions, exposure and responses. Losers are not born to lose. They’re programmed that way by their own responses to their environment and their decisions.

There’s a phrase I like to use—The Inner Winner—that describes the kind of person who recognizes his or her internal value, and who is able to use that recognition as the foundation for achieving any goal. The secret of wearing the gold medal around your neck in the external world is that first you must be an Inner Winner. You must recognize that you’re already an Olympian Within.

Thank You SUCCESS.

Every great success is made up of many many small successes and what I have learnt from my past experiences, failures and the occasional successes is that in order to achieve something great in life one has to plan it and create the path to take every step towards the desired direction in an extremely calculated fashion and this is exactly what I recommend anyone who has a dream to accumulate wealth and join the millionaire’s club to do. 

As a teenager when I was studying the art of Karate, my master once gave me an advice which I’ve never forgotten and as time goes on its proven to be very true. He said to me that son, “It will take you 1000 days of training before you start to become a student of Karate and it will take 10,000 days to master the art”. Over the last 10 years since I got that advice, I have realized how true it is not only for Karate, but also for anything else in life including relationships or your professional career. It does take 1000 days of practicing or experiencing something to truly start to understand it. The goal to become a millionaire can be achieved in 1000 days which will then give you a platform to start achieving in your life the things you plan to achieve. 

The Millionaires Club is a portal for anyone who dreams to become a millionaire to share their daily successes and failures and together with each other’s help take the steps that will bring you all closer to your goals. What we measure we can manage and what we manage we can improve and we should plan to measure, manage and improve every single day.