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USINESS guru Dan Pena is a classic American success story — and says he can show us how it is done.

Brought up in a tough Hispanic ghetto of East Los Angeles, he was arrested five times, jailed in his teens and looked to be heading nowhere fast.

Now he is now a multi-millionaire, living in an 80-room I 5th-century castle near Forfar, and he believes anyone who follows his theories can reap similar rewards.

His success has certainly been spectacular.

In 1982, with $820 in his pocket, he founded oil firm Great Western Resources. Eight years later it was worth $445million on flotation.

He has since had major successes with other firms, and he says his Quantum Leap Advantage method is the key.

“I developed this methodology here in Great Britain in the early 1980s, specifically in Scotland, because I have lived here since 1984.

“It is not something I developed in the US, couldn’t sell, then came to Scotland.

“I developed it here, went down to the City, took their money and came back to try to help, coach, teach, cajole or drag as many Scottish entrepreneurs as I can across the goal-line.”

A week of advice at his Guthrie Castle home usually costs £10,000 hut last week he told 700 Aberdeen entrepreneurs the secret of his success for free.

Mr. Pena, 51, was guest speaker at the first meeting of the Aberdeen Entrepreneurs’ Club at the Aberdeen Stakis, an event co-sponsored by Grampian Enterprise on the suggestion of one of his partners based in Peterhead.

“I am very keen to help Scottish entrepreneurs because I live here and Scotland has been good to mc. especially Angus county,” he said, adding that his daughter was born in nearby Dundee.

Mr Pena left Los Angeles afler he flunked out of college and joined the army. He quiddy rose through the ranks, becoming and Intelligence and Security Officer at NATO headquarters in the late 1960s.

He then took a degree in business administration at California State University, graduating in 1971. Heembarkedonacareer on Wall Street but left the financial hub in the late l970s to set up his own energy and natural resources business.

“I was dead broke, fired, made redundarn and I had $820. I started a company on Friday, July 13, 1982, and eight years later it was worth $4-5milIion.

“That was in a declining oil market. We did it through acquisitions. When our assets were declining in value, we went through a series of 20-plus acquisitions.

“I have done that not just once. I have been consolidating fragmented industries for 20 years.” He said he retired five years ago but is still chairman of several successful firms.

“I am in the construction and leisure businesses. At this stage in my life I have got to have fun otherwise I don’t want to do it,”

Mr Pens said there was no great mystery in making a business a winner, adding that his Quantum theory was mainly a distillate of the vital ingredients.

“They are precepts that people like Andrew Carnegie have been using for more than 100 years. It’s about raising one’s expectations.

“Most of the time our business success is more or less in line with what we expect it to be. If expectations are high, like Richard Bransori’s, results will be high. A myth we dispel is that geometric growth is not sustainable, you tell Bill Gates that!

“When you start your business and you go from zero to £50,000 in one year, you have grown geometrically.

“Then something happens — commonsensc dictates you can’t grow at 100% a year so you sit back on your assets and you become satiated.

“Bill Gates and other men and women that have grown tremendously successful companies didn’t adhere to that. They believed they could sustain growth that was more than just arithmetic.” He said has method also focused on how to get funding.

“The myth is that it is difficult to get money out of financial institutions. Most entrepreneurs become uncomfortable, but we get them comfortable about it.

“I’m in a position where the banks will come to me here at Guthrie. We sit in the library and look at the 18th bole of my own 18-hole golf course.

“A senior lender came a few months ago and told me that he was £778million under-loaned. Right now they have never been flush with more cash.”

Despite his ease in dealing with high-powered executives and multi-million cash sums. Mr Pena says he can also relate to the struggling business novice.

“I made my money in the same trench warfare they are fighting every day.

“I didn’t make it by writing a best-selling book, I didn’t make it by selling tapes and I didn’t make it by putting bums on seminar seats.

“I understand what it is to miss a payroll, to be months behind in your mortgage payrnent . to almost have your car taken away because you miss a payment. I can relate to all that because it happened to me. I am a hands-on business coach. I didn’t read 700 books like one famous guru, I have made 700 transactions.”

He said many people had the potential to become a big business success. “All my 40 business partners have come out of seminar audiences. All of them.

“Instead of opening up an office for merchant banking in London or New York, I use seminars as a conduit for business transactions for me to look at. It is a lot more fun. I don’t have to deal with the City.

“I just get to deal with the entrepreneurs. We cut all the advisers out and I am able to help them directly.

“Sometimes that direct intervention is money, sometime it is just showing them how to get the money. The fact that you had credentials, or didn’t have credentials, doesn’t matter.

Mr. Pens sees no bounds to his own success and predicts a bright future for his current batch of projects.

These include Success and Development International, which is due for flotation in the US in March of April. It is currently the 152nd fastest-growing firm in the Inc 500 list published annually in the US.

Press and Journal
February 5, 1997
David Gault

Glendy Blog American guru, American guru is man in a million, Dan Pena, News Article

hen Dan Pena was 22 years-old, he made a personal commitment to success. Now founder, chairman and CEO of Great Western Resources Inc. based in Houston, Texas, he is on the roster of Who’s Who in America and has been the subject of feature articles in the Los Angeles Times, Sunday Tel egrapli. Financial Times and The Sunday Times in England. Pena was keynote speaker at the International Trade Conference, held March 2, 1990 at CSUN.

 Pena graduated from Reseda High School in 1963. He attended CSUN as a niath and engineering student until he went into the army in 1966.

While serving as a security officer for NATO forces in Europe, Pena was responsible for “hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets. That coupled with the fact that it was the first time that I was academically and physically stretched, I saw that I could accomplish more than people thought,” he said.

He returned to CSUN in 1969 and changed his major to business management. “I got into an accelerated program, taking as many as 28 units a semester and 15 units in summer school.” He also took classes at UCLA and held a part-time job. “You have to force yourself to be organized,” Pena said. 

After graduation in January 1971 he took a job with a real estate investment company. In less than a year he became sales manager, earning a six-figure income. When the company folded, he was shocked. “My first taste of success had exploded in my face. Now I needed success more than ever,” he said.

Pena became a stockbroker and a financial planner. i-fe was vice president of Bear Stearns & Co., where he advised major U.S. and international clients. He then became chairman of J.P.K. Industries Inc., a vertically integrated energy company.

His most exciting professional accomplishment was founding his present company, Great Western Resources lnc.,in 1982 with $840. The energy company is now worth $450-$500 million. Great Western operates in 22 states and the Gulf of Mexico and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange.

His wife, Linda Sewall Pena, a CSUN alumna, says that his success is no surprise to her. “When I met him, I knew that he would definitely make his mark. I have always been his greatest supporter. There was a major business tragedy in our life, but I never thought that maybe we had better take a safer road,” she said.

Pena looks at Great Western not as a job or a career, but as a “way of life. Every conscious moment of the day is devoted to Great Western Resources, and probably when I sleep, too,” he said.

Being in the energy business, Pena voices concern over our nations limited natural resources. “I think this nation has to formulate an energy policy. We import over 46 percent of the oil we use, which is one percent worse than when we had the first oil embargo in 1973. Since 1980, 5,000 oil and gas corn-flies have gone out of business. The public is driving bigger cars again and people seem to have forgotten the long gas lines.

“Saudi Arabia has 200-300 years of oil left at current production rates. We have eight years of energy supply in this country. We have 400 years of coal reserves and coal is not popular unless it is low-sulpher. A student in Econ 101 can figure it out.”

Major international oil companies are “cutting back their oil exploration and production budgets in the U.S. anywhere from 50-85 percent and going foreign. The oil companies are going where they can get more bangs for their buck and the (foreign) governments help them.” As the major companies pull out of the United States, it creates a vacuum for independents to filI,”Pena said. “The market they’re leaving here is plenty big for Great Western to go from a $500 million company to a $5 billion company.”

Pena advises current students “to stretch themselves, academically, as much as they can. Instead of taking an elective that you know you’re going to get an A in, take physics. Take the hardest way through instead of the easiest way. See what you are made of,” he added.

“The only difference between going to Harvard or Princeton and going to CSUN,” he said, “is that the people from those other institutionsarcautomatically perceived to be very bright. When YOU go to a school where you have to explain the name, you are not perceived as very bright, even if you come in with a 4.0. Within the first year everything evens out, assuming that the kid who went to CSUN stretched himself or herself.

“As I told President Cleary, after almost 20 years, each year that goes by, I appreciate the opportunity that I had here and the education that I got here, more than I did when I first graduated,” rena said. “You learn to value what you have learned.”

Glendy Blog Alumni, Dan Pena, News Article