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

piece of programming you’ve ever received about limited options or prerequisites for exercising certain options. Limitations, rules, industry norms—these are for other people, but not for you. Reject any idea that removes any option from your table.

      Just for example, that certain options exist only for people with particular education, licenses, or certifications. Sure, you can’t just up and declare yourself a heart surgeon or airplane pilot. But you can certainly be the CEO, and you can certainly make as much money as you choose.

      Here’s a little jolt: one of the highest-paid marketing consultants and coaches working only with restaurant owners who I helped start in business, a man who is paid millions of dollars a year from those owners for his advice, has never worked in, managed, or owned a restaurant. For four years, I had the largest business training company serving dentists and chiropractors, working with over 10,000 doctors, but I am neither a DC nor DDS. The current owner of one of the most successful independent movie studios, who has prospered by bringing comic book characters to the big screen, in partnership with giants like Warner Brothers, did not work as script writer, camera man, grip, film editor, or actor, did not go to film school, did not apprentice in Hollywood before starting his movie production company. He owned a chain of dry cleaning stores. He liked comic books. And he proved adept at raising money from investors. The man who created one of the world’s largest ad agencies from scratch was a door-to-door salesman and a short order cook. Traditional qualifications matter if entering and trying to climb a ladder controlled by others inside a corporate organization but they do not matter at all in the entrepreneurial arena. Not at all. Only what you decide and do matters.

      This is a very disconcerting thought for people who have gone to great pains to secure academic or other credentials, i.e. the approval of others, or to build resumes. These people hate hearing this, resent it, resist it. Still, the marketplace is unimpressed by anything but the doing.

      You also need to reject limiting definitions. Single-function businesses are dinosaurs, with rare, notable, and generally unsustainable examples. Yes, there is such a thing as a gourmet cupcake bakery that makes and sells nothing but ungodly priced cupcakes—which reminds me of an old John Belushi skit from Saturday Night Live about the Scotch tape store, into which customers kept coming asking for paper clips or pens. The cupcake store exists. Let’s see how it’s doing in five or ten years. It won’t be there as is at all. It’s a fad, like the pet rock.

      The most successful “restaurant owner” that I know does not think of herself or define herself that way, although it is true that she owns a restaurant. But it is merely “the Bat Cave” for an aggressively marketed private party catering business, a wine school and wine tasting society, an e-commerce business selling her recipes, spices, prepared food items, and party planning “coaching” worldwide. The restaurant itself is open only 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