According to Investopedia, bootstrapping is “A situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital. An individual is said to be bootstrapping when he or she attempts to fund and build a company from personal finances or from the operating revenue of the new company.” For example, when I started my first company, I used the Family, Friends, and Fools (FFF) method of financing. I used $100,000 of my own money along with another $50,000 from my family and any fool crazy enough to give me their money to fund my company.

So, let’s talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of bootstrapping a start-up.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

CONTROL

When financing a start-up not through conventional means like a bank, but through unconventional means like joining an accelerator, venture capital, strategic partners, or angel investors, you must give up your precious equity in the company. It is important to remember that each one of these alternative financing arms have their own motivations, goals, and interests when they choose to invest in your start-up.

Time and time again, I’ve seen clients who gave an alternative financing institution a large part of equity in their company for little support and direction in return. Their interests are not necessarily the same, and then the clash begins. It can be particularly challenging trying to navigate these outside pressures.

By self-funding or funding through Family, Friends, or Fools (FFF), you get to answer to yourself only. This allows you the freedom to lead as you wish, set your own agenda, and most of all, keep the equity in your company. However, there are some downfalls to this.

Have you ever heard the saying “It’s not what you know, but who you know?” That is a very accurate statement when it comes to start-ups. Alternative funding sources are usually full of connections that you do not have access to. They will help you get meetings with the right people, connect you with valuable partnerships, open up markets, and give you increased visibility that you would otherwise not normally have. Lacking these connections, you’re on your own in many ways to find and build support, knowledge, networking, and financing.

As I tell my students, “It’s good to be young, because you can bounce back.” But what about the credibility you need to get to the right people? Not having outside investors may hurt your company’s credibility in the beginning. The question I always ask before I invest in a start-up is, “What kind of experience do these people have in running a business. How well do they listen, and who are their mentors?”

While bootstrapping gives you complete control over your company, self-funding may also shine a light on your company’s lack of resources and business experience. On the other hand, being supported by well-respected and credible investors gives many potential customers the confidence to buy in.

EQUITY

Not having investors allows you to keep 100% of your company. If you become a success through bootstrapping, at a later date you can seek additional funding for a much larger pie and do so on your terms. This means you can negotiate a smaller equity investment than you would negotiating while you are a start-up, because the investor has to take less risk when you come to them at a later stage of the company’s growth.

When bootstrapping, you tend to gain a lot more from your company if it becomes successful, but you will also lose much more if it doesn’t. Remember that the losses will be absorbed by you. Having an investor does allow you access to much-needed cash, but at a price: equity of your company. However, along with that much-needed cash comes a lot of experience, mentorship, and a strategic partnership that will help your company grow at a much faster rate with less mistakes—if you choose the right investment partner. Bootstrapping is risk-taking; you stand to gain a lot more if your company is a success, but if it’s not, all that loss is yours and yours alone.

TIME

Organic development is very time-consuming. When I started Credit Justice Services, it took us three years to get traction. Once the traction hit, however, our expansion was crazy. Yet, if we were to have an investor in the beginning, the growth would have been much faster. Without a large amount of cash on hand, the company would not be able to develop key components as quickly as we desired.

A certain amount of revenue is always required for expansion, research and development (R&D), employees, and marketing. This can happen at an accelerated rate with access to a capital investor. Without that access, some growth milestones will take longer to reach, and targets might have to be pushed further down the line.

In my experience bootstrapping my companies, time was usually a large obstacle I had to overcome. For the first three companies I started, built, and sold, I did so as a full-time airline pilot. I was fortunate that I had a schedule that allowed me 15 days off a month. That’s not common for most people, so they’re left with a minimal amount of time to devote to the start-up, especially if they have other obligations in their lives. This leads to the project taking a longer period of time to execute—sometimes years.

Start-Ups Should Learn the Following Before Proceeding:

• Is it better to have control over your business, but slower growth?

Money helps fuel growth. Money allows you to expand your employee base, market, advertise, and do R&D for a more rapid expansion in a shorter time period.

Bootstrapping means you may not have significant resources to draw on and you will need to dial back your costs. You might even need to keep your full-time job while you launch your business, which will slow down your growth process.

So, the question to ask is, “Can I accept that my start-up’s growth will likely be slower?” But remember, in return, you’ll maintain complete control over your business and its profits.

• Can you partner with an existing company to expedite growth (i.e., distribution, vendors, manufacturers)? 

Finding the right partner can be tricky; believe me when I say a bad partner is worse than a bad marriage. So, try to team up with vendors. For example, I would go to my wholesale manufacturer and ask for generous payment terms, sometimes as much as a three months payment plan. This will allow you to start your business without investing in inventory. A service provider may offer to finance inventory in exchange for performing other jobs for you, like equipment sales or a maintenance contract.

This enables you to keep the equity in your company, not take on an equity partner, and keep much-needed cash on hand.

• Do you need capital to test your idea? Customer Discovery first may show you don’t.

(Steve Blanks Driving Corporate Innovation)

Customer Discovery determines if there is a want or need for your product/service.

Here are a few ways to validate your idea that don’t involve significant investment (these methods are expanded upon in depth in my previous articles):

1. Customer Discovery – Find the pain points of the customer. Learn as much as possible about their needs and wants.
2. Customer Validation – Go back to the customer with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and confirm the customers pains and gains.
3. Customer Creations – Get-Keep-Grow your customer base by using the funnel method.
4. Company Building – This is very important and the most cash-bleeding part of the four-step process, so be sure to hire slowly, deliberate, and conserve cash.

• Can I afford to risk financial/emotional failure?

Creating a start-up will be the biggest emotional roller coaster you will ever get on. Dealing with government regulations, taxes, employees, vendors, and customers is at times like living in a pressure cooker.

You will experience setbacks, roadblocks, and naysayers, which are all amplified when you have limited money to throw at these problems. The only way to overcome this is by pure grit and creativity, but it can also be incredibly rewarding when it works and you watch your business grow! So, should you bootstrap your company?

If you’d like more information, please feel to contact me directly at dmuir@muirandassociates.net or go to my academic web site for more white papers and research at https://douglasmuir.academia.edu/

As an entrepreneur for over 25 years, I agree with Plaut when he says that when measuring the most renowned cities in the world for start-ups, you can be sure that Tel Aviv will be one of the first names to come up; but why exactly has the Israeli city garnered such a glittering reputation in the start-up community? Why does it seem to surpass its fellow middle eastern countries?

The Reluctant “Start-Up Nation”

Israel has plenty of innovators and researchers and is pumping out new, innovative ideas and research at record speed. Yet, a lack of infrastructure inside Israel to trade amongst its small economy pushes the startup community to look outside the country to sell its products and services. This may be preventing the emergence of companies on a global scale.

The Israeli nation has 34 political parties, yet only two dominate the political system: the Likud (conservative) and the Labor (social democrats) parties. The reluctance of the two political parties to embrace capitalism as a populist platform compared to the quasi-socialist laws that exist today is baffling. Despite the stifling laws and monopoly of some industries in Israel, the start-up community within Israel continues to grow at a rate admired by the world.

Plaut separates the political hype from reality—economic liberalism is still strong in Israel.  The same people looking toward the Scandinavian democratic/socialist approach as a form of governance also own the high-tech companies within Israel.  There is not a political party, neither right nor left, that publicly favors greater privatization of government run agencies.  While all parties are superficially opposed to monopolies and cartels, not one will instill free market competition or put antitrust policies in place.  All the parties ran on a left-centered or far left socialist platform.  None of the parties are for privatizing state-owned lands, non-state-financed universities, expansion of school choice, or use of vouchers.  No party ran on a platform to seriously reduce the dimensions of the Israeli welfare state.  So, how can a moderately taxed, fast-growing economy sustain such laws? Plaut says it’s the rhetoric of the politicians—they say one thing to the public and do another in secret. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (of the Likud party) talks about the status quo and then tries to bring in competition to their ports to fight the unions.  The financial markets are at .025 percent short term lending rates (Trade Economic, 2019).

The Israeli government has taken a big interest in the innovation and entrepreneurship community. It spends more than any other developed country on research and development.  Partnerships between the country’s private and public sectors fuel experimentation and innovation.

One initiative taken by the Israeli government in 1991 was to set up a Technological Incubation Program. The program currently includes 24 incubators: 22 in technology, one in industrials, and one in biotech, and is mostly privatized through public initiatives.  Start-ups are incubated for two years with funding ranging from $500,000 to $800,000, only to be paid back once the start-up begins generating revenues (Israel Innovation Authority, 2019).

Why Does Entrepreneurship Succeed?

The amount of sheer innovation coming out of Israel is truly impressive. How and why the Israeli people became so innovative can be credited to the fact that they need such innovation in order to exist.  It serves as a survival mechanism, the fact that they are so flexible, so quick with ideas, so innovative.  That’s what keeps them alive here, not only financially but literally.  Built in the wake of the Holocaust, Israel declared its independence in 1948 and was attacked by five of its neighboring countries simultaneously. Innovation took on a whole new meaning as its role became akin to survival, making the difference for Israel between existence and obliteration. For Israelis, there is a real cultural understanding from a young age that they need to be quick and innovate in all areas of life.

The numbers of mergers and acquisitions happening in Israel is staggering. The Israeli cybertech start-up, Sygnia, was acquired by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings for an estimated $250 million.  The return for the Israeli-owned firm was over 50 times the initial investment.  Last year, Intel purchased an Israeli company called Mobileye—a pioneer in autonomous car technology—for $15.3 billion (Haaretz, 2019).

Tech start-ups may not be the first thing that comes to mind when many people think of Israel—the country’s political strife is what makes headlines—but Israel’s achievements in innovation and entrepreneurship are remarkable by any measure for a tiny, embattled nation of 8.8 million people that has only existed for 70 years.  Just look at Tel Aviv and its strong and mature start-up ecosystem, with easy access to many experienced angel investors, venture capital firms, mentors, and talent.  This ability to get much-needed cash for start-ups is a must in a small economy like Israel, and there is a good reason for why Tel Aviv is nicked name the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

In the Tel Aviv tech scene, where sharing knowledge is considered the norm, all start-up entrepreneurs have adopted an open-door type of policy for the sharing of information.  Companies are able to easily get really great tips from seasoned techies and mentors.  This is the opposite of the United States, where all employees in the tech industry must sign a non-compete and non-disclosure contract before being hired.

Another important factor in Israel is that it has a young, diverse, and creative population.  It’s an inspiring place to live and work, with a talented pool of Universities offering a wealth of people to recruit from. Universities in the country produce plenty of research, much of which can be turned into viable and marketable products.  In that, Israel has plenty of experience: two out of the three oldest university-based technology transfer companies in the world are in Israel.  One is Yissum, which is owned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in 1964 became the third tech transfer company ever to be set up.  The first one was in Wisconsin in the U.S. and the second was Yeda, at the Weizmann Institute (also in Israel).  Tech transfers allow investors to come into the University and purchase research at an early stage, and in return, the University gets a licensing agreement.  This helps to perpetuate the cycle of research, development, and money.

Conclusion

Despite its small population of only eight million, Israel is a global leader in the fields of science, technology, and innovation.  Known after the best-selling book as the “Start-Up Nation,” Israel continually ranks at the top of global business and technology rankings. It is ranked as first in the world for innovation capacity, first for business expenditure on research and development (R&D), and first for entrepreneurship, (IMF and WEF Global Competitiveness Index, 2018).

Although Plaut describes the two fractured government parties of Israel as having more of a Scandinavian type of socialist approach, the government of Israel nonetheless protects and even encourages innovation and entrepreneurship.  Israel has expended 4.38% of its GDP on R&D—the highest percentage in the world (Innovation for Growth, 2013).  By maintaining a strong scientific and technological infrastructure and leveraging the close links between academia, industry, and government, Israel produces innovation and technology well beyond what is expected of its tiny size. The way Israeli youth are trained to innovate for survival, the community spirit around entrepreneurship, the government cultivating innovation, and the financial ability to fund start-ups, are all reasons for why Israel is known as the “Start-Up Nation.”

References

Haaretz. (2019). Singapore investment giant buying Israeli cybertech firm Sygnia for around $250 million. Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/singapore-investment-giant-buying-israeli-cybertech-firm-sygnia-1.6568986

Innovation for Growth. (2013). OECD science, technology and industry scoreboard [PDF File]. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/sti/scoreboard-2013.pdf

Israeli Innovation Authority. (2019). Taking innovation to the next level. Retrieved from https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/

Plaut, S. (2016). Israel’s socialist dream vs. capitalist realities. Retrieved from https://www.meforum.org/6046/israel-socialist-dreams-capitalist-realities

Trade Economics (2019). Israel interest rates. Retrieved from https://tradingeconomics.com/israel/interest-rate

U.S. Small Business Administration. (2016). Frequently asked questions. Retrieved from https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/SB-FAQ-2016_WEB.pdf

First and foremost, I want to make a disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor. I have been an entrepreneur for the past 25 years and am a person with some success who questioned the traditional forms of investing (i.e., Merrill Lynch, TD Ameritrade, Edward Jones, etc.).

The traditional way of investing is when you give your money to an investment advisor who then passes it onto a portfolio manager. That person then invests your money in a formulaic portfolio with thousands of other investors, hoping to beat the S&P 500, which generally will not happen. Then, you get monthly reports that look beautiful, but you don’t know how to read them, so you have no idea how much they are charging you or how much money you are truly making. Sound familiar?

As a 58-year-old man, I wanted to use my entrepreneurial spirit and innovative processes to find a better way to control my money with the highest possible return and the lowest risk.

When I sold my last company within my Family Office Private Equity Firm in October 2018, I was sitting on a bunch of cash. The banks at the time were paying 0.75% interest on a 1-year CD (known as a certificate of deposit, which has a set maturity date and interest rate), a savings account was paying 1.52%, and a 1-year money market account was paying 2.40%. These returns were not exactly setting the world on fire, and although very safe, they were not for me.

As an accredited investor (a person or a business entity who can deal in securities if they satisfy one or more requirements regarding yearly income and net worth even if they may not be registered with financial authorities), I had access to deals that most of my friends did not. The returns were high, but the risk was even higher. The investments were mostly in start-up companies coming through an Angel Investor Network (providing seed funding for start-ups). I did well in this space, but as I turned 50, the risk was too high for my comfort level.

What were my options?

I could pay expensive investment advisors broker fees whether my investments increased or decreased. That’s not a bad gig, being one of those advisors, if you can get it, because you’ll be getting paid whether you win or lose. While most financial advisors won’t lie, many will obfuscate clients to keep you from finding out how much you are actually paying. You could go to a discount broker (for example, Vanguard) and purchase low-cost, index Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which Investopedia defines as “a collection of securities—such as stocks—that tracks an underlying index.” It’s not difficult to do, and there are a plethora of different types of fees and sales charges that advisors will collect: front-end loads, contingent deferred sales commissions, 12B-1 fees, mutual fund management fees, operating expenses, asset-based fees, the list goes on (learn more about these different types of fees on Investopedia.com).

Since the S&P index is the gold standard, I started tracking it and found out the following: the S&P 500 Price index returned a negative -6.59% in 2018 and 6.793% over the past 10 years (DQYDJ, 2019). Now you need to subtract out your investment advisors’ fees (the average is 2%) and inflation of 1.951% over the past 10 years (Stat Bureau, 2019), and you are left with a whopping 2.843% return on investment. Now, these are rough numbers, but they still did not interest me. So, what was I supposed to do?

Solution

In 2002, I had the pleasure of meeting Eric, a hard money lender (a person who makes loans on properties and does not rely on the creditworthiness of the borrower, but instead, looks to the value of the property). Eric taught me a lot about finance, debt, and investing. He talked about being in control of your financial destiny by investing in what we today call, “alternative financing.” I started investing in hard money deals and was making a 12.5% return on my investment, which I would then reinvest (compound interest). Now my money and interest are making interest. Although there was a little risk of the borrower defaulting, we never made a loan that didn’t have at least 40% equity in the deal. For example, a house would be appraised for $100,000, and we would lend $60,000 to the borrower. What I’ve learned over the years is that it’s all about the underwriting of the borrow that will save you in the end. Although we have had two people default on our loan since 2002, we were protected by the equity in the house and made more money than the loan and interest amount.

This brings me full circle. As previously discussed, I was sitting on a bunch of cash. I liked the model of hard money lending, but I wanted to see if I could make more than 12.5% year over year—with no fees.

While having dinner with friends, I learned that one of them, Gayle, was a broker for a company that made merchant cash advances (funds provided to small business owners in exchange for a percentage of the business’s income, usually credit card transactions, over time. Payments are generally made daily or weekly using a percentage of the business’s daily credit card income). As a small business owner, I know how important cash flow is to the survival of a company. As Gayle told me about the unscrupulous companies in the industry taking advantage of the small business owners in need, I thought I could create a better and safer transaction experience for small business owners while at the same time providing them with much-needed and affordable cash. Here was a type of alternative financing that I could sink my teeth into. I would buy future credit card sales between $5,000 and $25,000 for no longer than six months and supply small business owners with much-needed cash flow.

The business model was perfect; I was helping companies grow while making a nice return on my investment. As I learned from Eric, it was all about the underwriting of the client. My wife, who was Senior Vice President for credit risk at one of the big Wall Street banks, knew exactly what type of client we were looking for. The process went so well that my friends and family asked if they could lend money to our clients for a nice return. Before we knew it, we were financing small businesses and helping friends and family enjoy returns that only accredited investors previously had access to.

The company my wife and I started is called the Family Business Fund. We ended up hiring Gayle as our full-time broker. She is amazing at making sure our clients DO NOT overextend themselves.

If you are tired of the standard 3%-6% return on investments and are interested in alternative investment opportunities while helping others, please feel free to contact customerservice@familybusinessfund.com and mention this article. I am also able to consult with my clients on the importance of using good, safe cash flow methods in order to make their company flourish.

If you’d like more information, please feel to contact me directly at dmuir@muirandassociates.net or go to my academic web site for more white papers and research at https://douglasmuir.academia.edu/ 

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends when someone asked me a typical American question: “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a professor at a local university and teach entrepreneurship,” I replied, knowing the usual follow-up question that would come next: “Hasn’t Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), shown that you do not need to go to college to be a successful entrepreneur?”
There is a growing misconception that higher education is not needed for entrepreneurial success, but that is just not true. A Kauffman Foundation study revealed that over 90% of American tech company founders hold a bachelor’s degree, and those with MBA’s are able to start and build their companies faster.
For the passionate entrepreneur, educational programs (especially those using the case study method) offer a great place to start learning practical skills that can reduce the learning curve for running a company. Let’s look at four ways entrepreneurship education can help the aspiring entrepreneur:
1. Innovation Labs (i-lab) and Accelerators:
There’s certainly overlap between incubators and accelerators, but the big difference is in the stage of the start-up. An incubator is a place where pre-revenue start-ups go to learn about their business model and how to build a company. The accelerator in most cases is post-revenue, has a specific amount of time in the accelerator, and receives a certain amount of funding for equity in the company. They are more interested in creating growth with the assistance of investors and connections.
There are 243 i-labs and accelerators located within universities around America. The University I teach at is creating an i-lab, which is slated to open April 11, 2019, for students, faculty, and local start-ups. These i-labs and accelerator programs connect young entrepreneurs to real start-up resources such as business mentors, lawyers, marketing personnel, classes, accountants, access to investors, and much more. This type of immersive education in entrepreneurship is harder to come by when you are starting out on your own.
2. Experiential Leaning
It is imperative that when studying entrepreneurship, you choose a university or set of courses that are taught by professors with real experience in the start-up world. It is just as important that the class be an experiential learning class (which emphasizes “doing” by applying learned skills, instead of just learning from the textbook). While some believe that entrepreneurship is not an innate talent that people are born with (which is a debatable claim), and you can therefore study to be an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship is—above all else— a skill that can be cultivated through learning, studying, and creating businesses. I agree when people say, “You can’t learn to be an entrepreneur from a book,” because books alone will not teach you all you need to know. That is why experiential learning must be part of the entrepreneurial development process. It is absolutely critical.
Entrepreneurs are much better off learning by “doing” and meeting mentors who have been down the start-up path and experienced most things themselves. These mentors are invaluable when it comes to learning and making the fewest mistakes as possible. They can give you advice from the journey they forged before you. Learning from the mistakes they made is one of, if not the, greatest opportunities to grow as an entrepreneur.
3. Learning Leadership Skills:
It’s often said that more than half of new businesses fail during the first year. According to the Small Business Association (SBA), this isn’t necessarily true. The SBA states that only 30% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 50% during the first five years, and 66% during the first 10.
The good news? Business majors with a track in entrepreneurship are required to take courses in leadership, problem solving, entrepreneurship creation, and introductory management skills, which heighten their chances of defying those statistics.
Entrepreneurship courses like the one I teach, “Presentation Strategies for Entrepreneurs,” will help you determine whether your business model will be feasible before you put any money into your new venture.
When I truly understood that I was never going to be the smartest person in the room just because I was CEO, I started trusting my expert employees to do what they do best: create and execute. I learned that I was only a teacher that gave them the vision they needed, and then I would turn over the reins. The secret then is to measure and double measure my metrics to help guide my employees. This type of leadership worked well for me. Leading is knowing where you are going and communicating that clearly to those working with you.
4. LOVE what you do:
As I tell my students at the beginning of class and the closing of the semester, “You have to do what you love, because you will spend one third of your life doing it.”
Entrepreneurship is very lonely at the top. It consists of ungodly amounts of worrying, anxiety, time, effort, and much more. If you don’t like being on the edge—living life one day at a time—then entrepreneurship is not for you.
I was an airline pilot for 20 years and hated it! When I created my first company in 1992, built it, and sold it to a larger firm, I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life. The 25+ years since then as an entrepreneur have been the most exhilarating, educational, and fun years that I’ve had in my entire life.
Teaching entrepreneurship at universities is also filled with a great deal of excitement. Being able to give back what was so freely given to me is the joy of my existence these days.
You must do what you love, or you will be miserable for a long time.
Happy entrepreneuring!😊

Overcoming Obstacles Is Key for a Successful Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Successful entrepreneurs don’t have the expectation of “finishing,” but they understand that it is all about overcoming the next obstacle that presents itself. If you do have the expectation of “finishing,” you won’t continue to push yourself to step outside of your comfort zone enough to grow. Entrepreneurship is like an escalator going down, and you are standing still, observing all the way, as opposed to sprinting right to the bottom. As an entrepreneur, you must keep seeking out the things that truly help your business achieve explosive results, and discovering all those things requires you to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Becoming a successful entrepreneur means understanding that hard times are when you need to push forward the most. You will have times of unbelievable joy, as well as more than a few setbacks. During the times of joy, you may feel like you can take over the world. It can give you the strength and motivation to continue to put in the long hours that are required to grow your business. During the hard times, negative feelings and emotions can easily take over, and before you know it, you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and things start getting dark very rapidly. This kind of funk is something you must snap out of quickly, or it will take you down. As an entrepreneur, you are at the top, so there are few people to turn to except other entrepreneurs and mentors. Even though it can be extremely difficult to pull through the hard times, it is possible. I want to share with you a few things that I’ve done to help myself during the down times.

1. Overcoming Problems – The only way to get through obstacles is to start by acknowledging that they exist. Your thoughts act as the gateway to your feelings and emotions. There is a very wise Buddhist notion about how what you think about and focus on is what you’ll attract more of into your life. If you believe you are failing, then you will, and it’s over. When you’re dealing with obstacles, your thoughts focus on what you can’t control and why that situation is happening to you. Instead of falling into that negative, cyclical thought process, give yourself a few minutes and take control of your thoughts. Focus on what brings you joy and what you’re grateful for in your life. It’s hard to be down when you’re expressing gratitude. It will amaze you how the right solutions come into fruition when you focus your mind on positive and creative solutions.

2. Embrace Change – Growing a business is not easy, or the world would consist of more than just 3% of entrepreneurs. Life is messy, and change can be uncomfortable, yet change is absolutely essential for entrepreneurs. There are always going to be things you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to control. There are, however, things that pop up that you can do something about, and situations that you can exercise some control over. For example, if your marketing plan no longer works, adjust it, and if sales are down, go back to what worked and make small adjustments. Or, if an employee is causing more trouble than he/she is worth, remove them immediately before they influence the others. Create a plan that will help you get on the path to recovery. There are things you can fix in your business no matter what is happening. First, identify what the problem is, then, do something about it. Focus on results.

3. Get a Mentor – Some obstacles feel like they are more than you can handle. Seeking counsel and support can be the difference between getting through crises or failing. Don’t try to be the super hero—seek help! One of the best things you can do is make decisions that help you recover, and seeking help is one of those decisions. Talking and planning with someone who understands your situation and has experience making it through a crisis is indispensable.

4. Make an Action Plan – Make decisions that are action-based. If you are contemplating a decision that will push you toward an action to help your business, make the decision! I’ve found that one of the best ways to recover from difficult situations is to take massive, laser-like action. Taking action regarding the things you can control will give you progress, confidence, and results. As you consistently take action, you’ll be closer to your goal before you know it.
I’ve found that obstacles always become my most productive learning moments, and they don’t have to be business breakers. I have learned from each failure, and have used them to make myself a stronger and wiser entrepreneur. I’ve seen how the most successful entrepreneurs understand that it’s not the crisis or failure, but the response to that crisis or failure, that determines how successful you’ll be. Stay strong, process your thoughts, create a plan, and then take action. It will get you through a crisis every time!