“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.”
— Samuel Smiles (Scottish author, 1812-1904)
Just ask Peter Barnes about failure and success.
The 54-year-old senior Washington correspondent for the Fox Business Network is also a serial entrepreneur who is batting one for three in business start-ups.
One hit. Two whiffs. No home runs.
I caught up with Barnes in several phone conversations between his Fox TV appearances last week, where he was telling viewers how much more they were going to fork over to the feds under the new U.S. tax rates.
Barnes is not just any working journalist. He is a resilient risk-taker, qualities that I envy.
The entrepreneur has actually put his cash, time and reputation into three start-ups. He has written business plans, raised money, met a payroll, paid taxes, hired and fired and — when it didn’t work — figured out the next thing. He can read a balance sheet and knows that “discount rate” is not the price of something at Wal-Mart.
“I really understand how hard it is to be an entrepreneur,” Barnes said. “Every person who is successful and is a gazillionaire, a lot of them have failed.”
Then he sent me the above quote from Samuel Smiles, which hung on the wall of one of his ventures.
Barnes, who lives in Alexandria, knows risk: He raised $300,000 — including the proceeds from the sale of a cherished childhood coin collection — to fund his first start-up.
He knows failure: He took a flier on an online financial news site called JAGfn.com, which fizzled.
He knows success: He and his wife, Cheryl, have written 20 children’s books, which have sold more than 500,000 copies and grossed $4 million in two decades. They also published a New York Times bestseller by a young poet from Upper Marlboro named Mattie Stepanek that grossed another few million dollars.
Barnes, who has an MBA from Wharton, talks openly about his business reversals.
He keeps landing on his feet at media shops such as Fox, CNBC, Hearst and the Wall Street Journal, where he covered some of the biggest names in American media, from Washington Post Co. director Barry Diller to the late William S. Paley, founder of CBS.
He must get his resilience from his family. His father is a former news photographer who worked at several high-profile universities before starting a home-building firm on Nantucket, Mass., which has built nearly 100 dwellings over the years. Barnes’s mother operated a yarn store called the Yarn Barn out of the family living room, then sold real estate on Nantucket with her husband.
“Entrepreneurism is in the genes,” said Barnes, who delivered newspapers, mowed lawns and painted houses while growing up.
Barnes got hooked on writing back in high school, when his mother snuck him into a lecture by the hugely successful novelist James A. Michener at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia.
Barnes covered sports for his high school newspaper and was a stringer for local newspapers. He worked at the Daily Collegian, a student-run newspaper at Penn State, and then got summer internships all through college, culminating at the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal.
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