The history of business is long. From the start of the first public company on the New York Stock Exchange in 1792 until now, the way in which companies do business has been well documented. Substantial works have been written about the strategies of successful businesses and the growth of a corporation; this book is not one of them. My goal for this book is to explain to the reader the potential failures involved in starting a business by using my own experience, not just from the standpoint of the financial and operational view, but taking an overall approach from business concept to the eventual sale of my company for a 5time EBIT return.
Throughout this text I will discuss my approach and the thoughts I had before, during, and after I started my company, including how my business almost went bankrupt, and how I eventually turned it around to prepare it for sale. I will discuss my mistakes in selecting partners because I was too scared to do it myself, and my errors in agreeing to contracts that limited my ability to control the company I built, and finally, how I was able to take back control, establish growth, remove one of my partners, and then structure the sale of the company to eventually allow myself the financial freedom that I set out to achieve by starting the company in the first place.
As a reader of this book. I hope that you will learn how an idea can become a company, how a company can become a burden if not structured correctly, and how a vision for a company can be a horrible thing if you don't have the skills to implement it properly or the personnel with the same passion for success as yourself. Using my personal experiences building a company, I will detail what decisions are necessary to be successful and how to financially structure your company not only to make money but to reduce risk and eliminate the unpredictability of sales cycles. I will share with you how to evaluate sales functions, secure capital, build an operations process, establish your accounting processes, utilize the power of marketing to build your company's presence, and ultimately avoid the pitfalls I made during my company's life cycle. To do this I will walk you through all the mistakes I made while building my company, detailing my biggest concerns and many sleepless nights worried about making payroll, paying interest on credit lines, and stressing over the families of the employees that left jobs to follow me in making my dream of starting a company a reality. I will be straight with you as to what mistakes really cost me money and what I did to overcome them. I am not interested in savvy business language and detailed financials. While they will be integral in helping you successfully run your business and we will discuss them as areas of opportunity, I want to give it to you straight. Businesses don't run on numbers, they run on people. They run on everyday decisions. Financials and analysis are the results of your decisions, not the path to evaluating the future. I want to take you through the pitfalls of the daily items you will deal with as a business owner, which, if not handled correctly, will cause you significant loss, loss you can't afford when you're starting a business from scratch and you have everything on the line.