No B.S. Business Success In The New Economy. Dan S. Kennedy

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СКАЧАТЬ ten nights a month to the public, about the same to members only, for prix fix dining experiences. How would you define this business?

WARNING: Your Entry Point to Entrepreneurship May Be a Handicap to Overcome

      For many people, the decision to pursue the entrepreneurial lifestyle is the by-product of an evolving dislike for their jobs, frustration with their bosses, or a sudden loss of employment. They may be downsized, forced into early retirement, or just get fed up one day and tell the boss to “take this job and shove it.” The employees-turned-entrepreneurs out of default or disgust lug a lot of mental and emotional baggage with them. The habits, attitudes, and behaviors that work for the employee in the corporate bureaucratic environment do not work well at all in the entrepreneurial environment, and must be left behind. The reason why so many new businesses fail is that the owners were unable to leave their old attitudes behind.

      There is no “doing enough to get by” in the entrepreneurial world.

      Clinging to narrow and traditional definitions—the equivalent of corporate job descriptions—can get you killed.

      And in The New Economy, there is no place to hide and a harsher, brighter spotlight is shining on your every decision and every move.

      Personally, I’ve only held one job in my entire life, for one year, immediately out of high school. I secured a territory sales position with a national book publishing company, that was supposed to be for a college graduate with sales experience. I got it through a combination of bluster, white lies, and agreeing to work on “free trial” for three months, no pay, no company car. Although I excelled at the work itself, by year’s end my sales manager and I agreed I was fundamentally unemployable. Thus I became entrepreneurial. However, I’d always intended to be my own boss, and I was very fortunate to have some preparation for it in youth, as my parents had been self-employed my entire life. While other kids were still reading comic books and filching their fathers’ Playboys, I was, too, but I was also reading Think and Grow Rich, listening to Earl Nightingale tapes, working in the business, riding with my grandmother on job deliveries to clients, and writing up my list of life goals. This is not a mandatory prerequisite. I know plenty of wildly successful entrepreneurs who came from much less helpful backgrounds. But I did have the edge of clear intent from the start of my adult life, and little time to acquire the bad habits of thought and behavior that most long-time employees of other people have to shed when switching to entrepreneurship.

      Anyway, I think, to succeed, you not only must make a firm and committed decision to do just that, you must also decide to give up long-held attitudes and behaviors that fit fine in your previous environment but do not work well in entrepreneurial life. Although I don’t swim, I imagine it’d be tough to swim across a good-sized lake insisting on clinging to a boat anchor. Letting go of anchors from your former life as you dive into entrepreneurial waters is essential.

Why Trying Doesn’t Work

      Some people think and talk in terms of “trying” a business or “trying” out the entrepreneurial experience. Before achieving major success in business myself, I went through considerable agony, corporate and personal bankruptcy, stress, embarrassment, humiliation, and near-starvation. If I’d been just “trying,” just taking a test-drive, I’d have quit. And make no mistake about it; my experience is the norm among ultimately successful entrepreneurs.

      Rich DeVos plunked down millions to buy the NBA franchise, the Orlando Magic, apparently to indulge himself. Many years, for as long as I can recall, Rich, and his lifelong partner Jay VanAndel, appeared on the annual Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest men in America. Certainly many have envied DeVos’ ability to buy a professional basketball team! What guy wouldn’t love to own his own pro sports team?

      But I wonder how many envied Rich and Jay when they were barely surviving in business, bottling a liquid cleanser in a decrepit gas station, delivering drums of the gunk cross-country to their few distributors in their own pickup truck, being laughed at by friends and family, in the earliest days of creating Amway. I wonder how many times they thought about quitting, but didn’t.

      I am not in their league although I’ve always found them inspiring. But I do own 20 to 25 racehorses at any given time—that eat while I sleep. I drive some of them myself, professionally, in over 100 harness races a year. I travel by private jet 90% of the time. I most recently indulged myself by buying a couple classic cars. My wife and I have two homes. We take a number of vacations each year. Consider all this a metaphor for whatever life you or others might envy. Many envy mine. Such envy, so-called class envy, is often exploited by politicians and has been most ruthlessly and shamefully exploited by President Obama. But it’s not a matter of “class” at all. There’s no such thing as a “rich class.” There are people like me who decided to get rich and made decisions others are not willing to make in order to do so, and make decisions others are not willing to make everyday to stay wealthy. Many people do not envy my work schedule at all when they discover how much I work, how disciplined my approach to my work is, and how hard I drive myself, day in, day out. Many people do not envy the massive amount of ongoing gathering, processing, studying, organizing of information that I do. In fact, forget envy; they outright state they wouldn’t consider working as I do. Even fewer would go through everything I’ve gone through so far to create and sustain this life.

      My friend Jim Rohn, one of this lifetime’s greatest success teachers, says that if you follow any highly successful businessperson around for a week—if you can keep up—you’d see the mystery of his success solved. You’d say, “Well, it’s no wonder he’s so successful. Look at ALL the things he does.” In my experience, most people given such opportunity, also wind up saying, “Well, I would never do ALL that.” Not couldn’t. Wouldn’t. And most would definitely quit the first time they ran up against a really ugly and miserable set of circumstances, like the recent recession. And that is why only about 5% of the entire U.S. population earns over $250,000.00 a year. Not for lack of opportunity. Simply because they decide not to. Any other explanation is nonsense. And any attempt to re-distribute wealth by government hand to those whose decisions are incompatible with wealth and do not cause wealth is doomed to failure, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.

      Yes, I Have Definite Political Opinions

      I don’t think you can separate personal and political philosophy. I find almost all highly successful businesspeople who’ve created their own success stories from scratch share a very clear political viewpoint. I write about mine in a column published weekly at www.BusinessAndMedia.org and in a special content section at the DanKennedy.com site: DanKennedyPolitics.

      It’s worth very seriously questioning whether or not your own decisions are compatible with success and are the kinds of decisions that cause success, and whether or not you are willing to make and live by these essential decisions.

Keeping Faith with Your Commitments

      To succeed as an entrepreneur requires decision and determination—total, unwavering commitment. To keep faith with this commitment, you have to develop and embrace attitudes, habits, and behaviors that are markedly different from those of most of the people you’ve known. You have to cut down on time spent with people who are not supportive of your entrepreneurial ambitions. Time spent hanging around fearful people, doubtful people, skeptical people, people not themselves committed to successful achievement, can СКАЧАТЬ