One plus one equals billion - Entrepreneurship lessons from Dwayne “the Rock" Johnson & Danny Garcia - Find out your core!

Ask yourself, What am I at my core? Dig deeper. What drives you? Why do you aspire to the things you aspire to? What is the thing that fuels us? The thing we know how to do best? What is the passion that, deep down, could fuel a dozen different jobs?

"I wanted to be a 10-lane highway approaching the world,"said Johnson. His core was this: Own all the lanes.

Reading the full article here:

• Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/348232 (you will need to subscribe to Entrepreneur magazine)
• A copy of the article: https://www.magzter.com/article/Business/Entrepreneur/ONE-PLUS-ONE-EQUALS-BILLIONS
• A copy of the article: https://on.readly.com/US/magazines/entrepreneur-media-inc/entrepreneur/2020-04-07/38/?share (Free subscription for 2 months on Readly)

Extracts from the article:

Dwayne “the Rock" Johnson's career was stalling. Then Dany Garcia stepped in to help change everything.

• Dwayne “the Rock" Johnson was a burgeoning wrester in the WWE. In the early 2000s, he was transitioning from wrestling into movies, and the road was bumpy.

Ask yourself, What am I at my core? Dig deeper. What drives you? Why do you aspire to the things you aspire to? What is the passion that, deep down, could fuel a dozen different jobs?

• We are salespeople, or accountants, or writers, or investors, or plumbers, or actors, or CEOs - but none of that is our core. That's just what we do. If you define yourself by what you do, then you are too easily disrupted. You could identify as a CEO, but your job could disappear. Then you are not a CEO, which means you are nothing.
• If you are a reporter, or writer, or an editor, you core is that you communicate. Or at your core, you build. Or solve problems. Or impact your community. Find out what your core is.
• Back to Johnson, at at that time, to identify his core, he said: “I felt like, to identify myself, realized that it was important not be narrow. I wanted to be a 10-lane highway approaching the world.” He was driving in one lane but realized there were actually nine other lanes he couldn't see. He was stuck in one lane. His core was this: Own all the lanes.
• He chose Garcia (his ex-wife) to become his new manager in 2008. At that time, Garcia has risen the ranks to become a vice president at Merrill Lynch and then founded her own wealth management firm.
• Garcia has a philosophy on growth: Don’t be the wrong kind of disruptive. It's good to challenge the way business is done, but it's not good to make abrupt and unearned change. This meant that Johnson couldn't go from one to 10 lanes of a highway all at once. They needed to plot a course, lane by lane. And the most logical first step was to gain more control of the movies he was in.

First lane: Built a production company called Seven Bucks (named for a moment in Johnson's life, before wresting, when he was cut from the Canadian Football League and had only seven dollars in his pocket).

• The company combed over the entire movie, looking for opportunities to enhance every actor's role - not just Johnson's. Studios did give them credit. And did start paying them. And Seven Bucks would go on to produce all of Johnson's work, from Jumanji to the HBO show Ballers, as well as many projects he's not starring in at all.

Second lane: Built social media business.

• Social media is a business built on irony. It’s driven by authenticity - when an Instagram or Twitter feed feels like the product of one person's hands and eyes. But as many social media influencer will tell you, “authenticity does not happen by accident. It is the product of strategy. Posts are crafted and scruntinized. Data is examined; learnings are extracted. Authenticity is what happens when willingness meets persistence.
• Johnson went all-in here, growing an Instagram following of 173 million strong. His colleagues always describe this in personal terms. “Dwayne treats it as a personal relationship he has every day.” “He’s always giving his fans a front-row seat to his everyday life.”
• But entrepreneurs should know: Effective social media does require more than that. And if you look closely at @therock on Instagram, you can see signs of it. The “front-row seat to his everyday life" is photographed beautifully and often packaged into video; that's a financial commitment to an on-the-go team whose cameras are trained on him. He regularly posts his extravagent "cheat meals" - awesomely indulgent food that breaks from his strict athletic diet - and that's what social media managers might call a franchise, or a repeatable concept built around what gets a great audience response. Everyone with a personal brand should develop their own franchises.

Third lane: Mechandise celebrity endorsement.

• There's something else you'll see throughout his social channels: things for sale. Everything that Johnson and Garcia have built or invested in - from movies to brand partnerships to a tequilla called Teremana that they just launched and also conveniently brought to the Entrepreneur photoshoot - make careful appearnaces. “One of the biggest learnings we found is that the more the auidence sees just how truly involved [Johnson] is - from the production all through the marketing campaign - they are so much more interested.” That insight helps inform these posts. It's not enough to just show a product and say it's for sale. No - you lead the audience into it and make them feel a part of the process. Johnson tastes the tequila. He refines the tequilla. He thinks about the tequila. He works on the tequila. And then, at the end, he doesn't need to sell it. The audience has already bought in. Some of these projects felt obvious - like, say, pairing Johnson with wellness or entertainment brands.
• There is, for example, Project Rock; that's a brand partnershsip with Under Armour. In October, they're debuting Atheleticon, a two-day fitness event in Atlanta. They also invested in, and serve as advisers to, the water company Voss and social media ticketing platform Atom Tickets.

Forth lane: Investing into businesses / areas, outside of the entertainment industry.

• Seven Bucks invested in and advised a quirky, Portland, Ore.-based ice cream company called Salt & Straw. The two companies found a lot of common ground. They both think of themselves as storytellers - Seven Bucks with its myriah of entertainment and marketing projects, and Salt & Straw in the way it develops flavors. For example, it recently had a symphony play in its kitchen and interpreted the music into ice cream. And to highlight the amount of food waste that happens in America, it once made a menu out of ingredients that were going to be thrown away.
• Salt & Straw released a series of Johnson-themed “Dwanta Claus" flavors, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The ice cream sold out in two days and has benefited Salt & Straw in ways the company couldn't have anticipated. Johnson and Garcia's big opportunity wasn't just to make movies or sell products. It was to make people feel good.

We talked about our cores: What is the thing that fuels us? The thing we know how to do best?

• Garcia said it's to "engage in the complete experience" - to simultaneously dig deep and see the big picture. Johnson said it's to "be a 10-lane highway approaching the world." How they evolved as leaders, they restated a version of their cores: Garcia is digging deep and rising above. Johnson sees massive opportunity and is fully committed to owning it. That's what happens when you have a well-defined core, and when you understand exactly how well it interlocks with your partner's. Lots of things will change after years of experience and billions of dollars, but the core will not. It cannot.
• Dwayne Johnson is the highest-paid actor in the world, having earned $89.4 million before taxes last year, Forbes reports in its 2019 list of the highest-paid actors. (Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/the-10-highest-paid-actors-and-actresses-of-2019.html)