Page 138 - Midas Touch

with a person I don’t trust, this makes me not trust you. It shows you do
not know what a good partner is. You guys are clowns, not business
people.”

The lecture was painful and it seemed to go on forever. Needless to say, we
left without the money. I did not speak to rich dad for years after that.

We did raise the $100,000, and rich dad was correct. We were bad partners.
The money was gone and the person rich dad did not trust, a CPA with the
title of CFO, actually did run off with the money.

More Bad Partners
I wish I could say that experience taught me a lesson. It did, but apparently

I needed to learn more because I have lived through it more than once.
Over the years, I have gone from bad partner to bad partner which,
according to rich dad’s assessment, makes me a bad partner.

The pattern of bad partners repeated itself time and time again. I would
start a business with a person or persons I thought were good partners. The
business would take off. Yet once successful with money coming in, the
good person would turn into a bad partner.

It happened in my Rippers business, then the rock-and-roll phase of
Rippers, then in my education company, and finally with my partner and
her husband in The Rich Dad Company.

In two of the businesses, success revealed bad partners who could not
handle success. They were not really bad or dishonest people. They had
simply never been successful. When success appeared, so did their

character flaws. For example, one partner in a small education company
simply started spending money like she was rich. Since she had never had
money, seeing so much money coming into the business only released her
pent-up desire to go shopping. When she started buying personal items
using the business credit card, Kim and I ended our partnership with her.
She was a good person who loved to go shopping.

In some cases, bad partners were dishonest partners. Interestingly, my bad

partners in both Rippers and Rich Dad were accountants and attorneys by
training, professionals I had hired to protect me from people like them.