For over three decades, Martin Silver has founded, grown, and managed a wide variety of funds and financial products as an advisor, entrepreneur, and leader at multinational institutions and privately owned diversified investment and credit companies. Through his experience, he’s gained deep knowledge of financial product development and innovation, has built a track record of consistent success, and has developed a unique, proven skillset in organizational management, operations, and legal matters. Today, as founder of MSS Consulting, he applies his experience to a wide range of diverse projects, including technology startups, real estate, asset-based finance, infrastructure development, and other ventures.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
A critical key to success and one’s productivity is being extremely well organized and taking the time to plan your days well in advance. The routine that I developed over many years has been to plan my day, including meetings, calls, follow-ups and other work that needs to get done the preceding day. I also prefer to hit the ground running Monday morning so I’ll spend an hour or so on Sunday reviewing my calendar for the week.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Ideas come to life in a variety of ways from many random sources, including magazine, newspaper articles, television programs, research on the Internet, and perhaps most importantly through conversations and discussions with colleagues, professionals, and friends. The key is being open minded and alert to opportunities.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Given my background in finance, I am most excited by the evolution and innovation in finance, particularly leveraging technology to enhance and improve due diligence, paperwork and all the processes required to facilitate a sound financing opportunity.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
The one habit that I believe contributes most to my productivity are my superior organizational skills. Over the years I’ve developed a variety of techniques, utilizing technology and customizing Microsoft Outlook to serve as my daily dashboard to stay on top of things and manage the wide array of projects that I can be working on at any point in time.
What advice would you give your younger self?
The best advice I could provide my younger self would be to be more discriminating and dealing more directly with red flags and signs of any potential issues in dealing with partners and staff members. Unfortunately, giving people too many chances has been counterproductive in my career. Trust your gut…if something doesn’t seem right, then there’s likely a problem.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?
That’s a very interesting question. The one thing that is frequently controversial in conversations with colleagues, friends and family is the fact that I view myself as being introverted, while the prevailing sentiment is that I am very much an extrovert. Despite their sentiments, I am an introvert. Over the years I’ve been able to develop various skills and techniques overcome this to compensate for this.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
One thing that I repeatedly practice and strongly recommend to all that will listen, is the old adage to “handle paper” once. This certainly applies, even moreso, to emails. When I receive an email including documents for review, I take one of several actions. I will move it to my to-do list, schedule it on my calendar for review, call and/or meeting or respond or at that time rather than take the position that I’ll get back to it at some point. In that way, my inbox is relatively CURRENT, short and sweet.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
When I feel overwhelmed or unfocused, I step away from my desk and seek some diversion to refresh. In order to refocus, it doesn’t take much. Sometimes it’s just stepping away from the matter at hand.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Well, there are many strategies that have helped me and contributed to my professional success. The one key strategy is sticking to the goal at hand. It’s critical to identify objectives and goals and plan them accordingly. As a discipline, set a recurring schedule to periodically measure performance and achievements against these goals.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
As one progresses throughout their career, one will more than likely experience numerous occasions where one will “take a hit“ to their career. The key to one’s future success is how one responds to that failure, learns from that experience, and gets up to fight again. An example that I encountered in my career was my lack of attention to detail and consideration to what may happen when I took on a new partner and had my attorneys prepare our company’s operating agreement. One gets caught up in the excitement and euphoria of starting a new company and I didn’t consider what issues and problems may arise. When these issues did arise, I was unable to resolve them in a meaningful and positive way due to a poor agreement.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
The one business idea that I would share with your readers is if you’re looking for a superior, intuitive, cost effective and easy to use and customize CRM application, Pipedrive is it!
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
The key piece of software that I rely upon is Microsoft Outlook. Aside from emails, it is a very robust application that I have customized to handle virtually all of my day-to-day organizational and planning activities. It is an essential and critical tool I use as my dashboard to manage my daily schedule, tasks and information that I need to review.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
There are several podcast that I enjoy and provide a respite from the intense work that I may be performing – They Include Conan Needs a Friend and Smartless. Great conversations, great comic relief and smart podcasts
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
As a great fan of comedy and particularly stand-up comedy, Hacks is a great program on HBO/Max. Aside from the great comic writing, it provides insight, behind the scenes of stand up.
Key learnings
• Organized and planning is a key attribute to success
• Strong operating agreements contemplating problems
• Deal with issues as they arise
• Leverage financial and CRM technology