Book Excerpt - The Peebles Principles

The following is an excerpt from the book The Peebles Principles
by R. Donahue Peebles with J.P. Faber
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; April 2007;$24.95US/ 29.99CAN; 978-0-470-09930-8
Copyright © 2007 R. Donahue Peebles

Prologue

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I came from what most people would describe as a middle class home, an only child in a one-parent household. But by the time I was twenty-seven I was a multimillionaire, and by the time I was forty-five I was worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

This book is the story of how I created that wealth, beginning with nothing. It is also a book about how to get rich, following the principles I learned over more than two decades of building my personal fortune. It is the breakdown of the deals that created that fortune and how I won those deals. It is a handbook of tales and tactics for a twenty-first-century entrepreneur.

Perhaps not everybody wants to get rich, but I would say that this particular desire is somewhere close to the core of the American dream. I know that I wanted to be rich when I was young. I wanted to achieve a financial stability that would free me from the worries over money that I experienced growing up. I wanted to leave that field of gravity forever.

My dream came true with my first big deal, when I was twenty-seven, which turned me into a multimillionaire. I have since consummated deals that dwarf my first win, but I have never had that same feeling.

I remember that day vividly, when I signed a letter of intent with the city of Washington, DC, to develop an office building on Martin Luther King Avenue. The bricks and mortar were still to come, but that document meant I would own half of a multimillion-dollar project and would be receiving a mid-six-figure income annually for decades to come.

When I returned to my apartment, at about 8 o’clock, a group of my friends were there. To celebrate, my girlfriend had gotten a cake from the Watergate Bakery, a white chocolate mousse cake, and a few bottles of champagne. It was a moment worthy of celebration, a breakthrough moment, the biggest event of my business career to date. It meant that my financial future was set from that moment on. I could quit right there if I wanted to; making a half million a year was more than I’d ever envisioned as a kid, when I was a teenager living with my mother and helping her make ends meet.

That night, lying in bed, I thought about it all. I thought back to how I was so impressed in high school when I learned that Walt Frazier was making $300,000 a year playing basketball. I’d wished that one day I could do that, and here I was, on my way to making more than that. It was just such a sense of relief. I was done. I didn’t have to do another thing except make sure the construction company actually built the building. What a great moment.
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