Donald Miller

Well, I'll tell you how it all started for me, and it started with failure. So failure is only a bad thing if you let it take you down, but if you let yourself learn from it, you can get somewhere. I actually, 11 years ago, lost all of my money, my entire life savings in a bad investment. I had paid off my house. I sold my house to buy another house.

The other house sold, so I was sitting on a pile of cash, put it into an investment, woke up one Monday morning, and my entire life savings was gone. And it was devastating. Eleven years later, I had a 17 million dollar company with more than 50 percent profit, 30 employees. And life was very, very different.

And one of the main reasons it was different and one of the main reasons I think businesses either succeed or fail is I 100 percent took 100 percent ownership of my career and my life and my business. Everything that negative happened, I took ownership of. Everything positive happened, I took ownership of. I didn't trust other people to make me money anymore.

And by that, I mean agents and speaking managers and the market, none of that stuff. I took ownership of it. And so as you talk about the economy... struggling, that's the economy. Your economy is different. So the economy has factors like trade wars with China, the war in Ukraine, all those kinds of things. Your economy is hardly affected by any of that.

Well, I'll tell you how it all started for me. And it started with failure. So failure is only a bad thing if you let it take you down. But if you let yourself learn from it, you can get somewhere. I actually, 11 years ago, lost all of my money, my entire life savings in a bad investment. I had paid off my house. I sold my house to buy another house.

The other house sold, so I was sitting on a pile of cash, put it into an investment, woke up one Monday morning, and my entire life savings was gone. And it was devastating. Eleven years later, I had a $17 million company with more than 50% profit, 30 employees, and life was very, very different.

It might be slightly, but most of us is hardly affected by any of that. It's actually more affected by our attitude. And if we take ownership of our economy, our economy can do incredibly well. So as I went from $0 to 17 million, I did a rough count, Hala. I think I did 572 things wrong and I did six things right. So the book, How to Grow Your Small Business is about the six things I did right.

And one of the main reasons it was different and one of the main reasons I think businesses either succeed or fail is I 100% took 100% ownership of my career and my life and my business. Everything that negative happened, I took ownership of. Everything positive happened, I took ownership of. I didn't trust other people to make me money anymore.

So the book really walks through and I turn those six things into six steps that you need to overhaul your business and optimize it for revenue and profit. And I just laid it out so nobody has to make the 570 mistakes that I made.

And by that, I mean agents and speaking managers and the market, none of that stuff. I took ownership of it. And so as you talk about the economy struggling, that's the economy. Your economy is different. So the economy has factors like trade wars with China, the war in Ukraine, all those kinds of things. Your economy is hardly affected by any of that.

It might be slightly, but most of us is hardly affected by any of that. It's actually more affected by our attitude. And if we take ownership of our economy, our economy can do incredibly well. So as I went from $0 to 17 million, I did a rough count, Hala. I think I did 572 things wrong and I did six things right. So the book, How to Grow Your Small Business is about the six things I did right.

Yeah, well, the S-curve explains why most businesses fail, and they actually fail because they succeeded. And here's what I mean by that. Nobody gets into business to run a business. Nobody. Not a single person in the history of the world has ever started a business because they wanted to run a business. They started a business because they loved their customers. They loved a product.

They wanted to be financially free. That's why we start a business. If that business takes off, the business owner then finds themselves doing something that they never thought or never even imagined or didn't realize they were going to have to do, and that's run a business.

So the book really walks through and I turn those six things into six steps that you need to overhaul your business and optimize it for revenue and profit. And I just laid it out so nobody has to make the 570 mistakes that I made.

So the S-curve is you love this product, it starts taking off, and you start going up and up and up, and then all of a sudden you're hiring people, you're firing people, you're trying to figure out healthcare benefits, you're dealing with customer service.

All of a sudden, you're taken out of the sweet spot you were in when the business grew, and you're put into a different role, and that role is running a business. And almost none of us have any education. Even if you got a master's degree in business, you don't know how to run a business. Most master's programs train you to be chairman of the federal treasury.

Yeah, well, the S-curve explains why most businesses fail, and they actually fail because they succeeded. And here's what I mean by that. Nobody gets into business to run a business. Nobody. Not a single person in the history of the world has ever started a business because they wanted to run a business. They started a business because they loved their customers. They loved a product.

They don't train you to run a business. And so we don't know what we're doing. And because we don't know what we're doing, customers realize it. Our products aren't as the quality is not as good as it used to be. The relationships we used to have with customers are now strained because we turn those over to account executives. We ended up falling on hard times a little bit.

They wanted to be financially free. That's why we start a business. If that business takes off, the business owner then finds themselves doing something that they never thought or never even imagined or didn't realize they were going to have to do, and that's run a business. So the S-curve is, You love this product. It starts taking off and you start going up and up and up.

So we ended up giving 90 day terms to a customer in order to get bigger profits. Then we ran into a cash flow issue. And you know what happens after that. You just kind of you bomb. So that's the down part of the S-curve. Now, that's where those 65% of businesses, that's where they crash when they hit the ground. The rest of us, though, we do something. We figure out how to run a business.

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