In my younger days, I started a number of businesses. Much to my dismay and deflated ego and my wife looking at me funny, I kept on failing miserably. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the drive or the ambition to succeed or the right business location or even the right business. It was that I wasn’t listening.
I finally realized that I was fooling myself. I didn’t know anything about running a business and the fundamentals of sustaining one.
I finally took the advice of the many who have tried to tell me and I succeeded partly because:
- I saved enough money to live on for 6 months.
- I hired at CPA, the best one I could find and we keep clean books.
- I had a realistic plan and put together a doable pro-forma.
- I followed my plan with some sidesteps to adjust to unforeseeable events.
- I worked my butt off and always pushed my way through stumbling blocks.
- I refused to let pitfalls effect the flow of the business.