Ziad K. Abdelnour is the Founder, President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc. a New York private “family office” in the business of originating, structuring & acting as an equity investor in strategic corporate investments and an associate partner with Kenzi Management Inc.; a trading platform focusing on the financing of real estate, infrastructure and project finance properties, the monetization of financial instruments and the trading of bitcoins on a massive scale.
For more details, visit their website here.
Here we sit down with Ziad to know more about his journey as an entrepreneur.
Q. Tell us a little more about your journey as an entrepreneur – how did you get started? What inspired you?
Ziad: It all started after the collapse of investment banking powerhouse Drexel Burnham Lambert (of which I was part), a juggernaut of a firm that changed the landscape of Corporate America through the creation and commercializing of the “junk bond market under the leadership of its czar Michael Milken.
It is then that I realized that no matter how big and powerful the firm you are working for is, things can change very quickly and that there is a huge difference between being in “charge” and being in “control”.
Q. What’s one thing in your routine that you do consistently that has made a huge difference in your personal or business life?
Ziad: There is much more than one thing in my routine that I do consistently that has made a huge difference in my personal or business life cause at the end of the day, success is much more complex than you think and is no accident or serendipity. Frankly, it has little to do with a routine that is more for robots not for killer capitalists and entrepreneurs; a breed much more unpredictable than you think.
To make a long story short, I had all the odds against me, and I crushed each and every one along the way. I succeeded because I’m a relentless capitalist, I’m an obsessed entrepreneur, and I’m a spartan like a warrior. That is the mindset I want to teach others so they can create their own wealth and American success story.
It is clear that many people today rise to the top by “kissing ass” and entertaining. I’m not here to entertain. In my opinion, if you try to please everybody and worry about offending anybody, nothing is going to happen. You might make some money, but you certainly won’t create “wealth”. You cannot create an omelette without breaking some eggs.
I’m an action-driven individual; Too many people today — including economists and academics in their ivory towers—watch from the sidelines and pontificate. You should do this. You should do that. But most of them have no “skin in the game”. They have nothing at risk, so they can talk the talk from now till the next century; not going to make an iota of a difference and they will never become wealthy. If they were anyway so smart, they would not be in academia in the first place.
A while back a guy came up to me and said: I love what you write, referring to all the blogs, articles and books I publish. Then he asked: How do you make a living? He expected me to answer: Oh, I do this. I do that. I work here. I work there. Instead, I told him the reality: I am not here to make a “living”. He didn’t expect that. But the truth is I don’t work here and there. I don’t make a living; I create wealth using the strategies, knowledge, and truths learnt over my decades on Wall Street and the venture capital/private equity business.
Bottom Line: I’m not an idealist. I’m a capitalist who wants to empower others to do what I did—find freedom.
So how do you define success: Is it money? Is it power? Frankly, it is none of the above. Success is about lifting and empowering people. The more you do that, the more you and they are going to succeed.
This is exactly how individuals and governments alike should think. I want to create a movement of smart, educated, well-informed, independent people and empower people to create their own wealth. And the best way to do that is by explaining how the system really works (not the bullshit propaganda) you hear every day. In the end, it comes down to this: To create real wealth you must abandon your limited thinking, eliminate boundaries, and stop defining the outcome. Most importantly it means not letting people motivated by jealousy, greed, and envy dictate what your limitations are.
You have to take risks in life. Your actions are what count. All that they teach you even at the most “elite colleges” in the country is for the birds. Colleges are here to create “complying robots” who can execute; nothing else. No wonder why the brightest entrepreneurs and business killers of today like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have decided to chart their own paths and dropped listening to the luminaries of Harvard Business School.
Q. Who are your mentors and inspiration? and what knowledge or insight did they give to you that was valuable?
Ziad: I track all the game changers in history and have read over 300 biographies in this regard
My mentors and inspiration are people larger than life.
I am talking about people such as JFK, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and Winston Churchill and many such people on the political side along with people such as John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Michael Milken and Elon Musk on the business side.
There is something extremely valuable to learn from these amazing individuals. They taught me tenacity, relentlessness, thinking smart and acting upon it. At the end of the day, only dead fish go with the flow.
Q. What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
Ziad: I had many satisfying moments in business throughout my career. Cannot define just one.
Bottom Line: “Action” is really what keeps me young, and makes me alive and well. I truly need to be constantly surrounded by super smart and active people if not I am bored to death.
In my golden years, I see myself sitting on the board of many companies – profit and non-profit alike- and advising them on growth, strategy, wealth creation, etc…. for the benefit of all and help shape US policy towards the Middle East in general and Lebanon in particular.
Q. How do you market your business, and which tactics have been most successful?
Ziad: I use a “pull strategy” instead of a “push strategy” in promoting my work and activities by providing content and services second to none. Never made a cold call in my life. People come to me because of the “value” I create.
For example, I am currently working on “Capitalism from the Inside Out: How the 99% Can Build Wealth, Fight Crony Capitalism, and Restore America’s Promise”. Pretty revolutionary book due soon
This work of art will pretty much disrupt the way people should do business, and create true wealth and influence.
Q. What have been your biggest failures or challenges?
Ziad: I had plenty of failures in my life which led to even more successes. At the end of the day, you learn from your failures rarely from your successes.
Bottom Line: It’s all about risk and how you manage risk.
At its most fundamental level, we at Blackhawk believe that risk management is a corporate culture issue.
To manage risks effectively over time, employees must put the firm’s welfare
and the preservation of important client relationships ahead of everything else.
Risk is risk, and you can’t be perfect at managing it.
Consequently, my team and I believe that the three absolutely indispensable ingredients of our success in managing risk are: Escalation, Accountability and Culture.
- Escalation means communicating risk concerns to higher levels of management, getting more fingerprints on potential problem risks and challenging the notion that a business group leader ought to make independent decisions on risks that affect the entire firm.
- Accountability, of course, means acknowledging that people are responsible for what their business groups do, and, equally important, holding senior management responsible for evaluating all aspects of risk, including the quality of the people with whom the firm chooses to do business.
- Culture. Our greatest risk protection, however, comes from ascribing as much status, prestige and compensation to those partners engaged in control functions as to those running businesses — and in constantly rotating partners back and forth between risk control and business operations.
In a nutshell, I believe that any responsible firm’s risks, do not result from proprietary trading, but rather from facilitating client objectives. Being an effective M&A advisor, for example, means giving advice that is actionable, which frequently requires the advisory firm to support the client through capital and other
balance sheet commitments.
I am glad Wall Street is headed back to an operating model centred on relationships and value creation as this is pretty much our forte here at Blackhawk.
Q. How did this failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
Ziad: My failures in my career led me to become much more resilient than ever and to adopt causes much bigger than myself to rise above the pack and reign supreme.
Having said that, there is more than one cause I strongly believe in…. but if I had to reduce my answer to one single cause, I would say it is the “democratization of capital” worldwide.
Just as it has in the United States, the worldwide democratization of capital will democratize industrial assets and produce an explosion of job creation. But the capital revolution, which so changed America in the last third of the 20th century, is only the prelude to the other two major revolutions of the 21st century — the worldwide democratization of health care and of knowledge.
These three revolutions, each aided by emerging technology, provide hope that the 21st century will be able to avoid the terrible conflicts of the past hundred years and become a new Age of Enlightenment.
Q. If someone was to create a TV show about you, what would it be about and what would it be called?
Ziad: Vision of a Global Financier
To keep up to date with Ziad, connect with him on LinkedIn.