About
Morning Lee
Entrepreneur since 1996. Author of Risk Free Startup Success and translator of From Leadership to Success. Today a licensed mortgage broker and Realtor in Vancouver, British Columbia.
1996 to now
I've started a lot of companies. Most of them worked.
I started my first business in 1996, selling computer parts and refurbished PCs while I was still at university. I didn't have capital, so I couldn't afford real mistakes — every dollar I lost was a dollar I'd have to explain to my parents. That constraint turned out to be useful. I learned to test an idea cheaply before committing to it, and to walk away from something that wasn't working before it cost me the ability to try the next thing.
Since then I've run a moving company, started in 2006, and a logistics company, started in 2010 — that one was the most successful of the group. In between there was a furniture store, a courier service, a cleaning company, and a jade business. Not everything worked. But nothing failed badly enough to take the next one down with it, because by then I had a method for keeping the downside small: test first, commit later, and never bet more than I could afford to lose.
That method is what eventually became Risk Free Startup Success: 6-Step PRISMs Method. I wrote it because almost every book about starting a company is written by someone — or for someone — who can afford to fail. I never could, and most people can't. So the book doesn't open with "take the leap." It opens with how to check the downside first, because that's the part nobody else seemed to be writing about, and it's the part that actually kept me in business.
A second book
Translating a book that isn't mine
The second book I've put my name to isn't one I wrote. From Leadership to Success: The Timeless Laws is my English translation of 素書 (Su Shu), a short classical Chinese text traditionally linked to the strategist Zhang Liang and the sage Huang Shi Gong — the full story is on the book's own page. I came to it originally as a reader, not a translator. It's one of the books I go back to when I need to think clearly about what actually makes someone worth following, in business or anywhere else. Translating it line by line was a way of sitting with it more closely than reading ever let me.
Today
Same instinct, different job.
These days I work as a licensed mortgage broker and Realtor in Vancouver, British Columbia. It's a different job than running a moving company or a logistics business, but it draws on the same instinct: helping someone make one of the largest financial decisions of their life without betting more than they can afford to lose. That side of my work lives at morninglee.ca.
I also host a podcast about mortgages and real estate — the same risk-first thinking from the book shows up there too. I've talked about the startup side of my work on it more than once; the two parts of what I do aren't as separate as they might look from the outside.
I wrote this book because almost every book on starting a company is written for someone who can afford to lose. I never could, and most people can't. The method in it is the one I actually used.Morning Lee