Category: Entrepreneurship
Building companies, and the failures that repeat.
The SBA just made buying a business harder. Here is what changed.
Four rule changes landed with the new fiscal year: a CPA quality of earnings report above $3 million, trailing earnings instead of projections, stricter debt service, and a…
Why founders fail. They strategize themselves out of business.
Some planning is really just avoidance—another deck, another persona exercise, another quarter without a paying customer; in other words, fear of failure. Forty-four years in, here is the…
The first week of a company
Almost none of the interesting decisions come first. The boring infrastructure does, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way that is invisible for about two years.
Nobody loses their nerve at the bottom. They lose it just before it works.
The failures I have watched up close did not happen in the bad months. They happened in the month things started going right. Here is what I think…
Nobody teaches you to be an entrepreneur
An employee once asked me who counts as one. Thirty years in, I had never stopped to answer it, and the answer turned out not to be a…
The ceiling was me
A logistics company I started in the eighties went from nothing to $120,000 a month in thirteen months, and then stopped dead. It took me a while to…