The Idea

Sunand had been floundering in life. He was qualified as a doctor. Did he really want to work all those hours. Doctoring is a profession in which if you are not part of the top 20% than you will work like a dog makeing only $150,000-$200,000 per year.

If you part of the 20% than you have a chance to make more then $500,000.

Sunand dropped Vinnie at Kaiser Permanente Hospital for her residency interview. Since he had a few hours he figured he would go get an oil change on his C class Mercedes.

He walked into Car Decor in LA. This was quite simply one of the most fortuitous moments of Sunand's life.

Here he met Dheer Naidu, another doctor that had been able to walk away from the profession and make his passion into a business. Like Sunand, Dheeru also had finished his Radiology residency and simply decided that he did not want to sit in a small room reading x-ray films his whole life.

He took the risk and took all his life savings and opened a fabulous facility for performance tuning of Mercedes. It took him three years to be truly successful, monetarily, but he had been successful from day one, when he walked away from a comfortable life of a radiologist and pursued his dream of working with Mercedes.

Sunand found someone to emulate and work under. Take a lesson here kids. Try and find someone you admire and see if you can work under him and learn from him. Having a mentor is one of the most important life achievements you can have.

Sunand worked under and for Car Decor for one and a half year. There was no pay. Most of the days were 12 hour days. It was hard work, but Sunand loved it. He listened, learned and then went home and read even more about cars and how to fix them.

He learned where Dheeru made mistakes. He learned what worked in the car business. He learned not just how to fix cars, but how to deal with customers, billing systems for a car business and so many other lessons you can only learn on the job.

Finally after one year of working he came to me to ask me about the idea of opening his own facility in Houston. I jumped at the chance to invest in Car Décor not just because of the idea, which was great, but because of the person. Sunand is most passionate and knowledgeable person I have even met when talking about high performance cars.

Here is another life lessons kids. Always invest in the management. A great idea will never work without people you trust to make that idea a success. Always, and I say it again, always invest in the person and not simply a business because it sounds great.