Taking Care Of Business. And Yourself

In March 1989, Daymond John launched an apparel business by selling hand-sewn hats on the streets of Hollis, Queens. Since then, his company—Fubu—has notched more than $6 billion in global sales, and he’s landed a seat as a star investor on the hit ABC series Shark Tank. In this exclusive interview with Inc., conducted over a long lunch in Chicago, John speaks candidly of the loneliness that comes with leadership, his hard-won understanding of why founders ignore their health—and the importance of a well-timed drink.

- Zoe Henry

You recently went public with your cancer diagnosis. Why?

Last year, I got an executive physical. The doctors found a nodule. They suggested taking out part of my thyroid; it could be cancerous, they said, but there was a chance they would be taking out a perfectly good part of the gland. I told them to do it anyway. It turned out it was stage-two cancer.

I didn’t want everyone to mis understand and think that I was dying. I know that it’s a touchy subject for a lot of people who have lost relatives to cancer. But I also know that people put their heads in the sand and go, “It’s a big world. It probably won’t happen to me.”

I realized that I wanted people to see me running around, doing what I do, cancer free. I wanted them to say, “I want to be like him. I’m going to get a mammo gram, or a biopsy, or a colonoscopy.” There was a slight chance I could save one, two, or 10 people’s lives. And after I started speaking about it, I got letters from people saying they got checked out and caught their disease early enough to treat it.

Founders aren’t always the best at taking care of themselves.

They take care of everybody else first.

They’re running around miserable.

They say, “We’ll get to it tomorrow.”

They say, “I need this money to buy a new cash register. I can’t do this. I can’t do that.”

In Fubu’s early days, though, you didn’t need money for a cash register—you needed it to save the business. Twenty seven banks turned you down for a loan, so your mother took out a second mortgage on the house you both lived in for $100,000. Were you afraid you’d let her down?