Dr. Abraham George
speaker
275 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Abraham George’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I worked at two strategy consulting firms. One was Booz and the other was McKinsey. And I really credit them with an incredible learning experience. I like to say I learned more in my first three years at McKinsey than I did at Harvard Business School. And Booz is, of course, very similar. And what's beautiful about these firms is that they're 100 years old.
And so they've really had the chance to do the Kaizen, do the continuous improvement, get better and better. What I learned from them, which I think is the most important thing, is to let facts and logic lead you to conclusions rather than start with your conclusion and cherry pick facts and logic to support it. And I think it's a really valuable skill in business and life to be open-minded enough
to set aside your hypothesis, your preconceived notions, and let the facts and logic lead you to the truth. That's what those firms taught me. Well, lots of things, but I think that's the important one, the most important one.
That resonates. My college roommate of three years went to work for Arthur Anderson. And he really waxes nostalgic about how wonderful the place was. And then they just had that one screw up called Enron that took down this revered institution. It is, it's a very sad story.
Well, I did a consulting project at Interon. It wasn't in the stuff that went south, but it was there in the business and it was quite something.
I think... My entire career, even as a 20-something, I had this notion that at some point I wanted my work and my passion to be the same thing. But I didn't know what that was or what that meant. And I knew that I would have a higher probability of success if I built the capabilities that came along with an industry career.
And I knew that I would have a much lower risk profile if I aligned my work and my passion with a bunch of money in the bank. And so I had that thought the whole time. And so I had a very clear savings goal. When you work at a hundred year old firm, what you're going to make each year.
So I had my spreadsheet and how much I was going to spend and how much I was going to save and all this kind of stuff. And the moment come came when I was like 36 years old. And I put a note in my calendar. It was on a Blackberry. You remember when we had Blackberries on our holsters or belts and we thought we were cool? We thought we were like Billy the Kid with our Blackberries.
It was great. I would bang out emails with my thumbs and I'm playing. I love that thing. Anyway, I put an invitation or a meeting on my 40th birthday, so four years hence, and it said in all capital letters, STOP. And what that meant to me was stop doing what the economy expects me to do and do what I love or do what I'm passionate about.
So that's, I gave myself four years to figure out what that meant. And it was only one year after I put in that calendar invite that a friend of mine said the Texas Renaissance Festival was for sale. And that was the moment the clouds parted and the angels sang and I got hit by a lightning bolt.
And it turns out that the Renaissance Festival is the only thing I've loved my entire life, other than my mother. I went there as a 12-year-old on a school trip, you know, yellow school bus, the whole thing. And I think I missed a year or two when I was 13, 14, but then I went to that show 38 years in a row.
And so that's traveling back to Texas from three years in Boston, three years in Germany, a year in England, a year in Russia, a year in Australia. I didn't want to mess up my streak. And what was fascinating about that is that it had never occurred to me that was a business. It was this thing that I loved. Like when October came, I just got giddy.
I was so excited to go to the Texas Renaissance Festival. But when my friend said it was for sale, I started scratching my head going, oh, yeah, I guess someone owns it. And someone there's a P&L on a balance sheet. And I start doing some numbers in my head. And I think that might be a really good business. And that's it. That set me on the path.
And so I actually tried to buy the Texas Renaissance Festival, which if you lived in Houston, I'm sure you're familiar with. And that didn't work. And then I tried to buy the one in Dallas and that fell apart one day before closing, which means like multimillion dollar loan from a big bank, signed purchase agreement, escrow, like everything is done. One day it fell apart.
And then so then I co-founded Sherwood Forest Fair, which is the, we say Renaissance Fossil because that's what people know. It's really a medieval fair because we're set in the 1190s. So I co-founded that with a business partner and we opened up in 2010. So we've been doing it for 15 years. And this past, we just do eight weekends. That's the standard for this business.
We had 167,000 patrons in 17 operating days. So it's just 10,000 people out there every day eating turkey legs and drinking meat and watching jousting. That's what I love.
Absolutely. It's not really a joke, but it sounds a little bit goofy when I say people think that owning a renaissance festival is really fun and sexy, and it is. But a lot of it is the line to get into the parking lot, clean toilets and the beer lines.
You have to put enormous amount of energy and then making sure people can get into the parking lot fast and they can get a beer fast and they can go to the bathroom fast. So there's a lot of just operational stuff going on. And of course, then the key elements of the value proposition are The stage acts.
So we hire the jousters and the falconer and the jugglers and the comedians and all these guys. And then we have our artisans. We have 170 artisans. So there's the boot maker and the hat maker and the glass blower. And you have to manage all those people. And then there's just enormous amounts of investments.
In some parts of the country, the Renaissance festivals are in public parks and they just take a few weeks and they build it up. It's more like a tent city. But in even more of the country, as in Texas and New York and Ohio, The fairs are permanent. So it's a permanent theme park. I've got like 200 buildings.
Showing 161–180 of 275 · page 9 of 14
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