Founder, owner and CEO of Spanx Inc., Sara Blakely, shares her father's unique philosophy about failure and how it influenced her success later on in life.
She shares her advice for entrepreneurs about how to take risks and redefine failure, which she believes often leads to a windfall of opportunities.
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Everybody makes mistakes when it comes to money — and billionaires are no exception.
In a new interview with MONEY, "Shark Tank" investor Mark Cuban and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, both self-made billionaires, discussed starting their respective businesses years ago with little money and tons of grit.
Blakely decided early on that she'd grow her company with only the cash she had on hand: "I've never really had debt — if I can't afford it, I don't buy it."
Cuban, on the other hand, turned to credit cards.
"For me, the hardest lesson I learned was getting my credit cards ripped up," said the Dallas Mavericks owner. "I would charge something and think I would be able to pay it off and then not be able to. I can't tell you how many credit cards I had ripped up."
But it didn't take long for Cuban to realize "that debt was not my friend," he said.
"Over time, what I've learned is using a credit card is okay if you pay it off at the end of the month. Just recognize that the 18% or 20% or 30% you're paying in credit card debt is going to cost you a lot more than you could ever earn anywhere else," Cuban said.
He's right — the opportunity cost of racking up high-interest credit card debt is immense. As MONEY explains, the average annual return for US stocks is 10%, 6% for government bonds, and 3% for cash.
If your credit card interest rate is higher — the average is 16.67% right now— you'll save more by paying off the debt, or staying out of it in the first place, than you'd earn if you invested it.
"The key is living within your means. Saving money and putting some into a low-cost mutual fund — like an [S&P index] fund — and living as inexpensively as you possibly can, will pay off dividends," said Cuban, who became a millionaire at age 32 after selling his first company.
Less than a decade later, he sold his second company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. His net worth today is $3.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.
"If you're making $30,000 or $40,000 a year, it's hard. But at the same time, if you can find a way to save, if you can find a way to invest inexpensively in the market, you can start to build your net worth," said Cuban, who reached his first $1 million in part by learning to "party like a rock star, but still live like a student."
Blakely, who is worth around $1.2 billion, agrees. "As my means change, maybe what I can spend changes, but I always keep that as my baseline. If I'm spending well below my means, I'm going to be in good shape."
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: The unglamorous first jobs of Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban and other successful businessmen
• Marriage is hard work for anyone.
• But some of the biggest names in business are enjoying very long marriages with their partners.
• Business Insider looked into each marriage to get a sense of the strategies each couple uses to make things work.
Marriage takes a lot of work.
So how do some of the biggest names in business manage to juggle their relationships while also running huge companies and organizations?
The answer is, it depends. No two relationships are exactly alike, and different pairs may employ different strategies in order to achieve marital bliss.
Still, a number of business moguls have seemingly got things figured out. Top businesspeople like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have both been married for over 20 years.
Here's a look at a few relationship strategies employed by some of the biggest names in business.
Source: Business Insider, Fortune, Business Insider
Source: Business Insider, Fortune, Business Insider
Source: Vogue, Business Insider
• Spanx founder Sara Blakely and Marquis Jets founder Jesse Itzler first met at a charity poker tournament in 2006.
• Itzler set up an elaborate scavenger hunt when it came time to propose to his now-wife.
• Today, they have four children and chronicle their family's adventures on social media.
When Sara Blakely arrived at the 2006 Net Jet Annual Las Vegas Poker Tournament, she didn't know much about poker.
Still, one of her sales representatives wrangled her a seat at the main table with Jesse Itzler. He was the cofounder of private jet company Marquis Jets, which was later acquired by Berkshire Hathaway's NetJets in 2010, Reuters reported. Blakely was a customer of his — she had a major phobia of heights and the New Yorker reported she figured "she could order the pilot to land" if she panicked while leasing a flight.
As it turned out, he didn't know much about poker either.
The pair bonded over their lack of knowledge of the game, and a friendship blossomed, according to Atlanta Weddings.
Blakely continued to hold Itzler's attention when she announced she was heading to bed early. "Who goes to bed at 9:30 at night in Vegas?" he told Success.com. "That intrigued me. And she loved to laugh, and that intrigued me, too."
Today, Blakely and Itzler have four children and co-own the Atlanta Hawks basketball team with several other individuals, AJC.com reported. Blakely is worth $1.21 billion, according to Forbes.
Here's a look at their nine-year marriage:
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, Sara Blakely Foundation
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, Sara Blakely Foundation
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, The Gasparilla Inn and Club
• Business Insider looked into how some of the most successful people out there met their spouses and partners.
• Several couples, like Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos and Bill and Melinda Gates, met at work.
• Others met at recreational events, like a charity poker tournament or a high school football game.
When Bill Gates first asked out his now-wife, Melinda, she said no.
When Lebron James first asked out his now-wife, Savannah, she had no idea who he was.
Warren Buffett's first wife introduced him to his future second wife.
Take a look below at how eight hugely successful couples first met:
She told Harper's Bazaar she wasn't aware of his growing star when she accepted his invitation to go check out one of his basketball games: "I had no idea who he was."
Source: Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, Business Insider
The only problem? He wanted to schedule the date two weeks in advance. She responded, "That's not spontaneous enough for me," Fortune reported in 2015.
Later that evening, Gates called her up later that night with a wry question: "Is this spontaneous enough for you?" Turns out, it was.
Source: Fortune, Business Insider, Business Insider
He told Success.com he was fascinated by her departure from the game: "Who goes to bed at 9:30 at night in Vegas? That intrigued me. And she loved to laugh, and that intrigued me, too."
Source: Business Insider, Success.com
Most kids are asked questions like, "What was the best part of your day?" or, "What did you learn at school today?" at the family dinner table.
Sara Blakely, founder of the billion-dollar hosiery and apparel company Spanx, had a bit of a different dinnertime experience growing up.
"My dad used to ask my brother and me at the dinner table what we had failed at that week," she told the audience at a recent Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship event in New York City. "I can remember coming home from school and saying, 'Dad, I tried out for this and I was horrible!' and he would high-five me and say, 'Way to go!' If I didn't have something that I had failed at, he actually would be disappointed."
This dinner table tradition allowed Blakely to see the value in failure. "My dad always encouraged me to fail, and because of this, he gave me the gift of retraining my thinking about failure," she explained. "Failure for me became about not trying, instead of the outcome."
Having never taken a business class and having zero background in the fashion retail industry, Blakely's investment in Spanx was a risk to say the least, but one she didn't mind taking.
Her gamble paid off — in addition to being named by Forbes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire in 2012 when she was 41, Blakely also made Time Magazine's prestigious 100 Most Influential People list that year.
"A lot of entrepreneurs are held back from the fear of failure, so that lesson from my dad was a real gift," she told the audience.
Rather than letting fear of the unknown or of not being good enough dictate their decisions, Blakely encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to use inexperience and weaknesses to their advantage: "What you don't know can become your greatest asset if you let it."
SEE ALSO: Spanx founder Sara Blakely reveals her secret for coming up with million dollar ideas
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The billionaire founder of Virgin Group has built an empire of companies across a variety of industries.
Much of Richard Branson's success can be attributed to the remarkably talented team of employees surrounding him.
How does he continually find the superstars amongst thousands of prospective job candidates?
Inc recently reported that one of Branson's three hiring rules comes from a conversation he had with Sara Blakely, founder of the billion-dollar hosiery and apparel company Spanx. She told him, "The smartest thing I ever did in the early going was to hire my weaknesses."
Branson builds strong and diverse teams by searching for talent in areas where he himself does not thrive. Rather than scouring résumés to find more "Richard Bransons," he looks for just the opposite.
"Don’t be afraid of hiring mavericks," he wrote in a LinkedIn post from 2013. "Somebody who thinks a little differently can help to see problems as opportunities and inspire creative energy within a group. Some of the best people we’ve ever hired didn’t seem to fit in at first, but proved to be indispensable over time."
SEE ALSO: Richard Branson gives 3 rules for hiring remarkable people
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NOW WATCH: Richard Branson Describes The Early Moment That Changed His Career Forever
"Sometimes million dollar and billion dollar ideas come into our lives daily," explained Sara Blakely at a recent New York City Network for Teaching Entrepreneurshipevent, which celebrated young entrepreneurs from all over the world.
"Sometimes they come and go, or sometimes you grab hold of them," she continued.
Blakely's billion-dollar idea, which turned into the booming business Spanx, surfaced one night when she could not figure out what to wear under white pants, and she made sure to grab hold of this idea — in a less than traditional way.
She first finagled her way into a meeting with the luxury fashion retailer Neiman Marcus. "People were like, 'How in the word did you land them?!'" she recalled. "I didn’t know it, but they had trade shows and most people in the industry would attend and hope Neiman Marcus would come to their booth. I simply called them. I called the buyer over and over until she picked up the phone."
After flying to Neiman Marcus' corporate head quarters with a pair of Spanx in her lucky red backpack, Blakely managed to convince the buyer to carry her undergarment product in seven regional stores.
What she did next was truly innovative.
Worried that the department store would drop her product if it didn't provide revenue, she called everyone she knew living near the seven stores — from college friends to elementary school classmates she hadn't spoken to in years — dispatched them to purchase Spanx, and mailed them a reimbursement check.
Neiman Marcus kept Spanx around, and hundreds of other stores across several countries came knocking on Blakely's door.
Hustle doesn't always look pretty — but it can unlock the creativity and innovation necessary for entrepreneurial success.
SEE ALSO: The surprising dinner table question that got billionaire Sara Blakely to where she is today
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In 2012, Spanx founder Sara Blakely became the youngest self-made female billionaire at age 41, according to Forbes.
As the company's sole owner, Blakely's ingenious invention has made her rich.
Forbes currently estimates her net worth at $1.01 billion.
Though she's far less extravagant than other billionaires, she's still making the most of her success.
Source: Forbes
Source: Business Insider, Forbes
Source: Business Insider
Before she became the billionaire founder of shapewear company Spanx, Sara Blakely failed a lot.
She didn't make it as a standup comedian. She couldn't become a lawyer like her dad because she failed the LSAT — twice.
She even auditioned to play Goofy at Disney World, but because she was shorter than the required 5'8", they made her a Chipmunk instead, Blakely said on a panel at the Forbes Women's Summit in New York on Wednesday.
She spent seven years selling fax machines and was rejected almost daily. People would hang up on her cold calls and rip up her business card in front of her.
"It was great life training," Blakely said.
Not only did she get used to hearing "no," but she learned how to get to a "yes."
"I had to learn to be concise, to tell them what's in it for them," she said.
All that training proved useful when she cut the feet off her pantyhose one day and realized she had a viable product: a slimming, seamless undergarment that no one would know you were wearing.
She kept her day job selling fax machines and worked on the Spanx prototype nights and weekends. While looking for a manufacturer to produce it, she spent months knocking on doors of North Carolina factories and getting them slammed in her face, she said.
"Who are you?" they would ask. "Sara Blakely," she would say.
"Who are you with?" they'd ask. "Sara Blakely," she'd say.
"Who is backing you financially?"they'd ask. "Sara Blakely!" she'd say.
Finally, she said, one guy "took pity" on her. After initially rejecting her, he'd reconsidered. He said he had daughters.
The rest, as they say, is history. Spanx is now a household name, and Blakely is one of the world's wealthiest self-made women.
The false starts and constant rejection taught her something profound about herself.
"One of my greatest weaknesses,"Blakely said, "is also one of my greatest strengths: being underestimated."
SEE ALSO: The fabulous life of Spanx billionaire Sara Blakely
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Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of shapewear company Spanx, has made a lot of mistakes along the way, but she's learned even more.
Last week at the Forbes Women's Summit in New York, Blakely shared her best advice for entrepreneurs.
"As soon as you can afford to, hire your weaknesses," she said. "What you're not good at is usually what you don't like."
Blakely hired a CEO to run the business when Spanx was just two years old, she said. It allowed her to focus on the things she was particularly good at, such as marketing, selling on QVC, and inventing new products.
"Hiring a CEO was very critical for me to stay on my strengths," she said.
This echoes the advice of other successful entrepreneurs, like media CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, who advises forgetting about your weaknesses and betting on your strengths, and "The 4-Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferriss, who says 80% of results come from 20% of your efforts.
No matter what your personality or skills may be, understanding how you can add the most value is the surest path to success.
SEE ALSO: Why doing nothing for a year was the best career decision Food Network star Ina Garten ever made
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Sara Blakely, founder and owner of the intimate-apparel company SPANX, is an artist. She has devoted the bulk of her professional life to crafting the perfect silhouette for women.
In 1998, Sara's wonderfully innocent aha moment happened when she cut the feet of her pantyhose to give her the smooth line she was looking for with her creme-colored pants.
She then took that simple idea, while maintaining her day job selling fax machines, and built a line of body-shaping products that are now indispensable to women around the world.
Here, entrepreneur and mother of four Sara Blakely (No. 61 on the BI 100: The Creators) tells us about her incredible rise and how she uses her company and her personal wealth to pay it forward.
Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis.
Executive produced by Diane Galligan.
It's not every company founder who plays a Britney Spears song at a company-wide presentation.
But "Oops, I Did It Again" was a key part of a recent meeting led by Sara Blakely, the self-made-billionaire founder and owner of the intimate-apparel company SPANX.
Blakely had organized the presentation around her "oops" moments, or the mistakes she'd made throughout the company's history. The goal was to communicate to employees that failure can be a good thing because it means you're trying something new.
"To encourage people to fail, I'm bringing up my failures in front of the team often," Blakely said in an interview with Business Insider. "I'm always openly talking about it."
In this particular presentation, Blakely went through a bunch of "oops" moments, some more recent than others, and assigned a theme song to each one. "Oops, I Did It Again" played while Blakely talked about a particular pattern of mistakes she'd made.
Blakely's celebration of failure stems from her father's habit of asking her and her brother what they'd failed at that week, when they were kids. If Blakely announced that she'd tried out for something and bombed, for example, "he would actually high five me and say, 'Congratulations! Way to go!'"
"What it did was just reframe my definition of failure," she said. "Failure for me became not trying versus the outcome."
When it comes to her employees, Blakely says it's important for them to approach their failures from a constructive perspective.
"If there's a failure or an oops in your life," she said, "if you learn from it and if you can laugh about it, then it's all worth it."
Alana Kakoyiannis contributed additional reporting.
SEE ALSO: How a decade of rejection rocketed billionaire Spanx founder Sara Blakely to mega success
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: How Sara Blakely went from door-to-door saleswoman to billionaire philanthropist
Sara Blakely didn't have a business degree.
She hadn't started a company before. She wasn't especially familiar with the process of making clothes.
But what she did have was $5,000 in savings and a passion for the product she was pitching to manufacturers.
It was the late 1990s, and Blakely wanted to transform the intimate-apparel industry, rendering the old adage beauty is pain irrelevant.
Today, Blakely is the founder and owner of Spanx, a company with about $400 million in annual sales.
So what bridged the gap between the inexperienced 20-something then and the self-made billionaire today?
According to Blakely, it was her ability to bring a fresh perspective to the industry.
She told Business Insider:
"It's fascinating what people can do if you don't get hung up on, 'I don't have the specific training' or, 'I wasn't taught this in school.' Break through that because if you approach things with a fresh eye and you don't know how it's always been done, chances are you're going to do it differently and better."
For Blakely, that meant focusing on the way her body felt in undergarments, and not how they were technically "supposed" to be designed.
Here's Blakely again:
"I would put the product on and I would say, 'Something isn't feeling right, right here,' and I would be relentless about it. And after maybe 10 times of asking the same question, they [the manufacturers] would go, 'Well, the yarn is spliced there and there's a motor movement there,' and I would be like, 'OK, don't do that.'"
At first, Blakely said, the manufacturers were completely resistant to the idea of change. Eventually, however, they stopped responding to Blakely's ideas with an automatic no and started responding with "Let's see."
Bottom line: Just because you don't have technical knowledge about a field or an industry doesn't mean that you can't break in. In fact, your relative lack of familiarity may be an advantage.
You might be more sensitive to how customers experience the product — and what they're looking for in a new one.
Alana Kakoyiannis contributed additional reporting.
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: How Sara Blakely went from door-to-door saleswoman to billionaire philanthropist
Billionaire founder and CEO of Spanx, Sara Blakely, hosted a Navy SEAL in her apartment, per her husband's invitation. Here's what she learned from the man who pitched an oxygen-deprivation tent in her guest bedroom.
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Spanx CEO Sara Blakely shares her thoughts on failure and success and how her father helped shape her ideals.
Follow BI Video: On Twitter
Founder, owner and CEO of Spanx Inc., Sara Blakely, shares her father's unique philosophy about failure and how it influenced her success later on in life.
She shares her advice for entrepreneurs about how to take risks and redefine failure, which she believes often leads to a windfall of opportunities.
Follow BI Video: On Twitter
Everybody makes mistakes when it comes to money — and billionaires are no exception.
In a new interview with MONEY, "Shark Tank" investor Mark Cuban and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, both self-made billionaires, discussed starting their respective businesses years ago with little money and tons of grit.
Blakely decided early on that she'd grow her company with only the cash she had on hand: "I've never really had debt — if I can't afford it, I don't buy it."
Cuban, on the other hand, turned to credit cards.
"For me, the hardest lesson I learned was getting my credit cards ripped up," said the Dallas Mavericks owner. "I would charge something and think I would be able to pay it off and then not be able to. I can't tell you how many credit cards I had ripped up."
But it didn't take long for Cuban to realize "that debt was not my friend," he said.
"Over time, what I've learned is using a credit card is okay if you pay it off at the end of the month. Just recognize that the 18% or 20% or 30% you're paying in credit card debt is going to cost you a lot more than you could ever earn anywhere else," Cuban said.
He's right — the opportunity cost of racking up high-interest credit card debt is immense. As MONEY explains, the average annual return for US stocks is 10%, 6% for government bonds, and 3% for cash.
If your credit card interest rate is higher — the average is 16.67% right now— you'll save more by paying off the debt, or staying out of it in the first place, than you'd earn if you invested it.
"The key is living within your means. Saving money and putting some into a low-cost mutual fund — like an [S&P index] fund — and living as inexpensively as you possibly can, will pay off dividends," said Cuban, who became a millionaire at age 32 after selling his first company.
Less than a decade later, he sold his second company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. His net worth today is $3.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.
"If you're making $30,000 or $40,000 a year, it's hard. But at the same time, if you can find a way to save, if you can find a way to invest inexpensively in the market, you can start to build your net worth," said Cuban, who reached his first $1 million in part by learning to "party like a rock star, but still live like a student."
Blakely, who is worth around $1.2 billion, agrees. "As my means change, maybe what I can spend changes, but I always keep that as my baseline. If I'm spending well below my means, I'm going to be in good shape."
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: The unglamorous first jobs of Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban and other successful businessmen
• Marriage is hard work for anyone.
• But some of the biggest names in business are enjoying very long marriages with their partners.
• Business Insider looked into each marriage to get a sense of the strategies each couple uses to make things work.
Marriage takes a lot of work.
So how do some of the biggest names in business manage to juggle their relationships while also running huge companies and organizations?
The answer is, it depends. No two relationships are exactly alike, and different pairs may employ different strategies in order to achieve marital bliss.
Still, a number of business moguls have seemingly got things figured out. Top businesspeople like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have both been married for over 20 years.
Here's a look at a few relationship strategies employed by some of the biggest names in business.
Source: Business Insider, Fortune, Business Insider
Source: Business Insider, Fortune, Business Insider
Source: Vogue, Business Insider
• Spanx founder Sara Blakely and Marquis Jets founder Jesse Itzler first met at a charity poker tournament in 2006.
• Itzler set up an elaborate scavenger hunt when it came time to propose to his now-wife.
• Today, they have four children and chronicle their family's adventures on social media.
When Sara Blakely arrived at the 2006 Net Jet Annual Las Vegas Poker Tournament, she didn't know much about poker.
Still, one of her sales representatives wrangled her a seat at the main table with Jesse Itzler. He was the cofounder of private jet company Marquis Jets, which was later acquired by Berkshire Hathaway's NetJets in 2010, Reuters reported. Blakely was a customer of his — she had a major phobia of heights and the New Yorker reported she figured "she could order the pilot to land" if she panicked while leasing a flight.
As it turned out, he didn't know much about poker either.
The pair bonded over their lack of knowledge of the game, and a friendship blossomed, according to Atlanta Weddings.
Blakely continued to hold Itzler's attention when she announced she was heading to bed early. "Who goes to bed at 9:30 at night in Vegas?" he told Success.com. "That intrigued me. And she loved to laugh, and that intrigued me, too."
Today, Blakely and Itzler have four children and co-own the Atlanta Hawks basketball team with several other individuals, AJC.com reported. Blakely is worth $1.21 billion, according to Forbes.
Here's a look at their nine-year marriage:
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, Sara Blakely Foundation
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, Sara Blakely Foundation
Source: Success.com, Atlanta Weddings, The Gasparilla Inn and Club
