Top 20 Stories Of Self Made Millionaires

John Paul Dejoria

The Forbes' list billionaire John Paul Dejoria began his entrepreneurship journey as a door-to-door salesman. "I started with $700 in 1980. Inflation was 12%. Interest rates were 18-20%. Unemployment was 10.5%, and you had to stand in line around the block to get gasoline for your car." Now worth about five billion dollars, Dejoria deeply struggled to start the Paul Mitchell. Dejoria and his partner, Paul Mitchell, didn't possess startup cost or advertising money. They found their way around this business obstacle by maintaining the quality of their beauty products.

This lead to workers in the industry to be frequently using their top quality beauty products and then recommending them to other workers and their customers, which was Dejoria's goal. He and Mitchell really hung in there during the first two years of their business launch; "By all normal business standards, we should have declared bankruptcy every week." The principles he follows have been instilled in him as a young child when he started learning how to sell products like Christmas cards and newspaper subscriptions. Now he is worth billions and feeds 8,000 hungry people every day. Apparently, John Paul Dejoria never gives up until he achieves his goals. "If you knock on one hundred doors, and show your product to one hundred people and they all say 'no,' or won't even talk to you, you have to be just as enthusiastic at door 101 as you were at the first."