Elder Statesman of Entrepreneurship Peter J. Burns III is a Self-Made Man Who Gives Back to Budding Businesspeople
Nearly half a decade of business experience has earned Peter J. Burns III the title of Elder Statesman of Entrepreneurship.
It’s a fitting moniker. For decades, Burns has helped finance, start up or manage more than 150 businesses. Along the way, he’s spent thousands of hours mentoring young or inexperienced men and women to help them find their way in the business world.
Unlike many men of his era, Burns recognizes he was born of privilege. Raised by wealthy parents in New Canaan, Connecticut, Burns nonetheless ventured out in life on his own. His own entrepreneurial story wasn’t financed by family money. He built businesses from scratch and learned life lessons by trial and error.
Today, he’s at the forefront of a unique, passive-income funding process that involves online stores and A.I.-powered crypto bots. He also oversees the Millennial Queenmaker and Start Up Kings programs, which offer both financing and mentorship.
Those are all stories that were nearly 50 years in the making.
The Peter J. Burns III Origin Story
How it all started. Born into a wealthy New England family, Burns had exposure to unique opportunities. His father, however, made sure he and his two younger brothers understood that they were going to make their own money and success.
That was ingrained into the very fiber of Burns’ being by his father.
Even as a child, Burns had a knack for finding and capitalizing on opportunities with outside-the-box thinking.
At the age of 7, Burns was out by one of the local country club’s golf water holes selling lemonade. He augmented that business by wading into the water and selling errant golf balls back to duffers.
That enterprise ended abruptly when the club’s manager called his father, a member of the club, and asked to have young Peter removed from the course.
“Peter is just a child,” his mother said to his father at the time. “Don’t worry, he’ll be like the other children.”
That turned out to be incorrect.
It wasn’t in Burns’ makeup to be like other children. There’s a certain freedom that comes with entrepreneurship — freedom of independent thought and flow of ideas, and of testing and exploring those ideas.
That kind of mind can never be fully boxed in for long.
Other entrepreneurial ventures sprang up throughout his youth. “Boogie at the Beach” became an annual summer event where he rented out the beach club where his family belonged, throwing a huge keg party with hamburgers and hot dogs galore and a live rock band — all for an admission price to his “thousand closest friends.”
Burns was educating himself with the real-time practical application of supply and demand, inventory control and the pluses and minuses of an all-cash business.
These are concepts most young people learn about through higher education, and then only in theory.
The Peter J. Burns III Teen Years
Academically, Burns barely made it out of high school. And when one of his “sure thing” business deals soured and his father couldn’t take it anymore, he found himself with the unenviable choice of paying for college himself or joining the Army.
Off to basic training he went. After four months in the swamps of Ft. Polk in Louisiana, Burns found himself the proud and somewhat surprised recipient of a Secretary of the Army Appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Since the Academy had started for the year, he was placed at the United States Military Academy Preparatory School, where he met a cadet candidate whose father was the colonel in charge of the Army ROTC Scholarship Program.
Burns learned that it was much better to be an officer than an enlisted man, and he gleaned that going to a civilian school and becoming a full-fledged officer would be more fun than matriculating to “The Point.”
Burns was Regular Army. The ROTC program was for civilians. Still, he persisted and to everyone’s surprise, he won a spot.
He started at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1976. He relinquished his West Point Appointment to a deserving alternate.
At college he found a second-semester course at University of Virginia’s venerable McIntire School of Commerce that spoke to him: Entrepreneurship.
The challenge: He was a freshman and the course was a senior elective. But Burns doesn’t view obstacles the way others do. He looks for ways around them and is always pushing the envelope.
After filing a petition with the professor at the business school, he was allowed to verbally defend himself in front of the entire class about why a “lowly first-year student felt that he merited the honor of being in a fourth-year course.”
Burns was successfully admitted into the class, where he fit in perfectly.
Forging an Entrepreneur
The Entrepreneur course requirement was to come up with a potentially viable idea and draft a business plan to make its case for funding. Burns had a cool idea and convinced a couple of classmates to help draft the pro forma and put the plan together.
That brainstorm — the importation of mopeds from Europe to the United States, with the plan of establishing rental operations at select resorts — became the subject of his class project.
He got an “A.” Then he decided to go for it in the real world, during summer break.
In May 1977, he rented a dirt lot in downtown Nantucket Island. Burns bought a folding table and cash box from the local thrift shop for 50 cents. He unloaded his 15 new mopeds onto the lot and started his first official business.
He quickly threw away the class business plan, since nothing they researched and forecasted had any resemblance to the rough-and-tumble world of real-life business ownership.
He learned many invaluable lessons. After counting his pennies ($55,000 worth) at the summer’s end, he tendered back the three remaining years on his ROTC scholarship, wrote his professor to tell him that he’d been right about him, and set about on his expansion plans for world domination in the recreational rental industry.
And within a 20-year span, Burns created the largest recreational rental chain in the world, eventually opening up over 100 locations around the U.S. and Caribbean.
Thus, Burns officially launched into entrepreneurship on a full-time basis. To date, with a wink in his eye he observes how life is good and he’s never had to hold down a 9–5 office job.
To read more about his business accomplishments, click on this timeline.
Giving Back
Though born a privileged scion, Burns made it on his own and now takes satisfaction in giving back to other hard-working would-be entrepreneurs.
He knows how hard it is for anybody to get a start-up company off the ground.
It’s no secret there have been more barriers in the workplace for females — and to that issue Burns has been running a high-demand program for women-only called Millennial Queenmakers.
Seeing that the demand and interest in his funding and mentorship program wasn’t limited to one gender, he also created the Start Up Kings program and has begun vetting male applicants.
Burns knows people aspire to become an entrepreneur, and are tired of having a boss.
Those are the main reasons people reach out to serial entrepreneur/mentor Peter J. Burns III.
He’s been helping start-up companies for decades and now his programs are fortified with his innovative program for passive-income generation — fueled by online stores and crypto bots.
Interested? Get more information on all of Burns ongoing operations and efforts through the Peter J. Burns III website or leave an email message here.
