Los Angeleno Michael Amin is an entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and fourth-generation pistachio farmer. He is the founder and CEO of Primex World Inc., an investment firm with a diverse portfolio encompassing pistachio orchards and other real estate, as well as a wide variety of private equities.
Michael is also the founder of Maximum Difference Foundation (MDF), championing causes related to healthcare, education, humanitarian aid, and environmental conservation. Through strategic partnerships with organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and The Innocence Project, MDF tackles social problems of all stripes and enacts positive change throughout the world.
Q: What qualities do you believe are essential for effective leadership?
MICHAEL AMIN: A leader can have a wealth of different characteristics, so long as they are effective at accomplishing goals and inspiring their teams. The most helpful qualities, I believe, are patience, perseverance, open-mindedness, compassion, and an ability to analyze and reflect. It also helps to have a knack for creativity and a tolerance for risk.
Q: How do you ensure that your vision and values are communicated and practiced across all your organizations?
MICHAEL AMIN: I’ve found that identifying people who, in addition to being talented and hardworking, also share my vision and values, is the most effective way to accomplish this. With the right sort of people in the right positions, vision and values can permeate throughout multiple organizations with what amounts to very little effort. But I’ve also found that this is important to get right from the start. If you put the wrong sort of personality in an important executive job as the company is just starting out, it can be quite damaging.
Q: Can you share an experience that helped to shape your career?
MICHAEL AMIN: There have been many, of course, but the one that springs to mind immediately was my experience with QuickPix One-Hour Photo. It was the first company I helped build from scratch, and as the name suggests, it was a rapid film development business. When my cousin and I started it, I had just graduated from college and was eager to put my business degree to work. We were one of the first in the country to create a one-hour photo shop business. We wanted to franchise it. But by the mid-1980s, there were too many other players in the field. The market had become saturated. I decided to focus my attention on creating two new businesses instead, which is how I came to create the Top Attorneys Directory and Primex Talking Yellow Pages.
I learned two important lessons as a result of that experience. One: being one of the first to market with a new idea does not necessarily guarantee success. Two: if and when your first idea doesn’t work out, simply come up with a new idea, and keep doing that until you find something that works.
Q: How do you decide which causes MDF devotes resources to?
MICHAEL AMIN: We have a well-established process that includes listening to pitches from various parties, reviewing and analyzing data, and conferring with experts. After all that is concluded and if everything checks out, in many ways it becomes a judgment call. I weigh the cause in question in my mind, think about the people it might affect—or in some cases, the portion of the environment—and listen to my heart. But truthfully, if the numbers indicate that it will bring relief to a lot of people who honestly need it, or if it will make a significant difference in preserving part of our planet, MDF will probably become involved in some capacity.
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