Author Type #7: Exited Entrepreneur
You came, you built, you exited.
You learned some things, too. Perhaps now you are mentoring, or coaching, or investing. You have had time to think about the significance of what you’ve done and how you’ve grown; you are grateful for what has happened to you; and you have desire to give back.
It’s time to share your wisdom.
Monty Moran did it. He did the thing that almost every entrepreneur yearns to do: take something small, make it a huge success, and walk away with a pile of money and the laurels of success. Monty joined Steve Els when Steve was running a few burrito shops in Denver; he left Chipotle after building it into a Fortune 500 company and darling of Wall Street.
Along the way, Monty learned some things. He developed ways to motivate people. He had to look at what was working, and what wasn’t, and make hard choices. He faced his own personal challenges. Eventually, he came out of that crucible with what I would call wisdom, and he chose to share it.
The result was two books that Monty and I created together. First we wrote Love Is Free, Guac Is Extra. This is what I call a “business memoir,” (see my first post in this series) a story about growing Chipotle, but also a story about Monty’s life. It contains lessons and wisdom about how they made Chipotle that a reader could use, but those are more implicit than explicit. The second book was more personal and more spiritual. No One Is a Stranger is Monty’s honest, vulnerable story of how he has developed a deeply open, empathetic approach to every human interaction, and how that has helped him throughout life. It’s not the sort of book you expect an S&P 500 CEO to write, which is why I felt Monty was brave to write it.
More than once, I had to buck him up and reassure him that he really was doing the right thing.
Four years after Love Is Free, Guac Is Extra was published it maintains a 4.8 star rating on Amazon. No One Is a Stranger, which came out in 2023, has a 4.9. “Monty is a phenomenal writer,” said one reviewer, “who has a way with words to navigate the human condition in a way all can relate to. Whether you are in business, or just a member or a family/society, we all would benefit from more people reading his work.”
Like many authors, Monty worried that he would be criticized for what he wrote. Reviews like that are a reminder that the best books connect people with each other.
