Few serial entrepreneurs outperform Larry H. Miller

Most everyone knows that an entrepreneur is someone who assumes the financial risk of beginning and managing a new venture. The venture can be based on a new product, a new way of doing something, doing the same thing at a new location, or it can be such a revolutionary new idea that it is an attempt to do something that no one else has ever done before.

Building a successful venture usually requires much greater effort than originally expected, and it involves significantly more risk than was anticipated. For this reason, most victorious entrepreneurs choose to simply manage their first successful venture until they retire rather than subject themselves to further aggravation and risk. They are comfortable knowing they have established themselves in a position of respect in the community and have become financially independent. Now, their greatest desire is to protect what they have earned.

Those who still have the entrepreneurial itch after this first major accomplishment will typically try to replicate their successful business model in a different marketplace, or they may apply their model to a related product or different brand.

From this latter group of successful businessmen you will find very few truly unique individuals who I refer to as the "serial entrepreneur." They are extremely bright, creative, aggressive, restless, decisive and hard-working. They are consummate risk- takers who thrive on new challenges in every area of their interest. They delight in following the old cliche of "doing 100 things once, rather than doing the same thing 100 times."

It has been my privilege to know and to work with many exceptional entrepreneurs, but the one whom I most admire as a "serial entrepreneur" is Larry H. Miller. Most of you know Larry's story: how he began as a counterman in an auto parts store and progressed to become the owner of a Toyota dealership in Murray. He then did what many successful entrepreneurs do by replicating his successful dealership model, first in different locations and then with different makes and models.

During the 1980s he began to spread his entrepreneurial wings when he pursued what at first may have appeared to be wildly unrelated businesses, but he has succeeded in linking them together in a brilliant way.

He is now among the top 10 mega auto dealers in the U.S., with 38 dealerships in six states. He also owns the Utah Jazz, the Delta Center, KJZZ television station, Jordan Commons office park, numerous restaurants, multiple MegaPlex theaters, along with many other ventures. He has produced movies, bought the Salt Lake Stingers, and he is currently building a 511-acre, multimillion- dollar, world-class automobile and motorcycle race track near Tooele.

It's also noteworthy that Larry easily qualifies as a "social entrepreneur," because he has a passion to bring business-like discipline and innovation to strengthen the entire community. For example, a few years ago, he was Salt Lake City's unpaid special projects manager who directed the completion of the Franklin Covey Field.

He will be forever grateful for the free enterprise system, and he is guided by his "10 Principles of Free Enterprise," which state, among other things: the place where a leader "lives and works should be better when he left than when he came"; "the essence of the successful entrepreneur is a person who does not find space outside the box because there is no box"; and a leader "endeavors to meet the needs of others because they are all part of one's own world."

Larry H. Miller is also one of the state's foremost philanthropists, and he is an entrepreneur who has a vision for the future that is filled with opportunity for everyone. He is building a legacy in the state of Utah that will benefit every resident for many years to come.

David M. Brown is affiliated with the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

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