We both laughed heartily at the joke, but it held a golden nugget of truth: there is a better way to do business—to work smarter instead of harder. It is possible to start a company without the traditional years of headache and heartache.
And that’s what this book is about: teaching you a better and faster way to create explosive growth in your business.
When Giordano’s Pizza was founded in 1974, the Dow was at 580, and Warren Buffett was telling everyone, “This is the time to start investing.” We didn’t have the internet, so there wasn’t the wealth of knowledge we have now about the principles required to start and grow a successful business. Without a relationship with someone like Warren Buffett, most startups stayed small or floundered. Take the story of Giordano’s: two brothers, Efren and Joseph, took their mother’s famous “Italian Easter Pie” recipe from Torino, Italy, to the US and opened their first restaurant. The pizza was so good they called the recipe a “sacred tradition,” and I can attest it is one of the most savory pizzas I’ve ever eaten. The pizzeria received accolades from the New York Times, Concierge Magazine, CBS, NBC, and others. No question they had a recipe for an incredible pizza, but what about one for an incredible business? How many mistakes did they have to learn “the hard way”? How many sleepless nights did it take until they finally made it? If only their mother had left a “success tradition” recipe to follow as well.
Having a personal success recipe is a superb way to think about this book: a linear plan for building an amazing business and avoiding the painful and slow slog through the trenches, pitfalls, and numerous rookie mistakes. Had I been able to share this recipe with myself twenty years ago, I might have avoided several blunders launching and growing my first multimillion-dollar company. Viewed from the outside, I was winning awards, filing patents, working with most of the Fortune 500, expanding internationally, and being written up in magazines as one of the 40 under 40 entrepreneurs to watch. On the inside, however, I was nervous about how I would make the next payroll. I wouldn’t wish that amount of stress and hand-wringing on anyone. And since I can’t go back and mentor my younger self, I want to share my entrepreneurial recipe with you—a recipe grounded in principles and tested in the real world, that you can follow to accelerate revenue and profits.
There is a better way to do business today and you don’t have to know Warren Buffett to take advantage of it. With the right mix of motivation, skill, and team members, it doesn’t matter if you’re crafting the world’s best pizza or cooking up your own entrepreneurial dream.
And yet entrepreneurship is fraught with peril: 30 percent of all businesses in America fail in the first year and 50 percent fail in the first five. The truth is most businesses don’t fail—entrepreneurs quit. The reason they quit is because the entrepreneurial process has sixteen pitfalls baked right in (pun intended). Each one of the pitfalls is an inflection point toward wild success or shutting the doors. Most entrepreneurs who have made it past the five-year mark have figured out how to navigate at least half a dozen pitfalls. The ones that make the news because of rapid growth fly past these pitfalls masterfully. That’s what this book is about.
Like Mama Giordano’s “Sacred Tradition,” the recipe for navigating past these pitfalls didn’t come from the halls of an elite culinary school (a.k.a. an MBA) but the hard-won experience of trial and error in the real world (mixed with a few years leading the global marketing effort for one of the world’s premier leadership companies). And yet nearly all entrepreneurs (including myself) contend with these pitfalls every time they set out to build a new business.
In my case, I remember thinking my business was special…that I was creating something that had never been done before. It was easy to take that belief and assume it would be enough to fuel the momentum to succeed. Destiny, here I come!
But it wasn’t so easy, despite my business truly being one of a kind and with a modus operandi that was even more unique. Very few companies around the world were creating interactive media the way we were, and the creators of the software we used said they’d never seen a more advanced Rich Internet Application (RIA). So, with a new patent and industry awards under our belt, it makes sense that it would all have fallen together perfectly. Only it didn’t, and I wasn’t prepared for the price I had to pay to make it all happen.
Later, as I reflected on this experience and the experiences I was seeing as a consultant, I could see a pattern at work: my start-up clients were experiencing the same pains I had pushed through years before. For example, they would typically hit an invisible ceiling within the first couple of years. They were experiencing the same personnel issues within the first few years. My clients were trying to find the path to rapid growth in the same way I had experienced it. They found similar challenges at each financial milestone (such as five, ten, and twenty million in revenue), as well as other inflection points that I had experienced—and often in the same order.
If you feel that pull toward starting your own business and are ready to jump into the start-up waters (or, having already jumped in, you’re feeling you may be in over your head), I’ve written this book for you as a:
•Visionary looking to take your idea, product, or service and turn it into a viable business
•Business owner looking for rapid growth and revenue
•Founder of a start-up looking not only to survive but thrive in the days to come
“No is the amplifier of Yes.”
—Crawford Cragun
“Entrepreneur’s Paradox: You have to give up being the best in the world at building your product to be the best in the world at building your business.”
At the core of this book is a paradox: what got you into business is the very thing that will actively prevent you from succeeding in business.
That’s right—you, the entrepreneur, are typically one of the most proficient people in the world at a particular skill, craft, product, or idea. You’ve thought of or created something that has never been done before, especially in the way you’ve conceived it. When others find out about how great your idea is, they ask for, even demand, your product or service. In fact, they often love the product or service so much they compel you to start a business repeating that expertise over and over again. It can be thrilling knowing you can contribute to the world and seeing how many people appreciate what you do and the way you do it. But such a passion can create its own kind of trap. In the beginning, everything feels exciting and the business appears to be thriving (if it weren’t for this honeymoon phase, I’m not sure anyone would start a business). But that newfound freedom can quickly shackle you with grueling hours and endless to-do lists. And where you thought you would find personal and financial independence, there’s stress, erratic cash flow, and bills instead.
This book will show you how that initial spark of brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit can be the very thing that inhibits entrepreneurs from achieving their goals—regardless of industry or business type. But by recognizing and working through the chapters in this book, you can learn to work through the Entrepreneur’s Paradox and experience growth equal to the passion that gave it life.
Who This Book Is For (And Not For)
This is not a management technique book. I have not aimed it at large corporations or start-up founders who have already had multiple equity events or an IPO. Although many in the corporate world will find this book helpful, I’ve written it for those in the entrepreneurial trenches. I wrote this book for start-up entrepreneurs looking for a way to create rapid growth and break through to the next level. It is for founders of companies typically in the first two to ten years of business. And it is for first-time