Chapter 8
Pulling a 180
The Business Turnaround
When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.
—Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics
We've talked about the one quality that separates entrepreneurs from everyone else: a willingness to take risks. Exactly what risk is involved in entrepreneurship? It's the fact that sometimes, despite all your best planning and efforts to make your business thrive, you can end up in trouble—on the brink of going out of business, and maybe even losing everything. It could be that you made a mistake in predicting your original idea's viability, or underestimated your capital needs. It might be that something completely unexpected happened, like the economy taking a nosedive—something we saw on a wide scale a few years ago. Consider the many homebuilders who were great businesspeople, had plenty of capital, and were soaring high for years prior to 2008—and then lost it all when the market went away virtually overnight. Some might say they should have seen it coming, but hindsight is always 20/20, and not many people predicted what ended up happening.
Company failures don't always require a major event—like the housing crisis of 2008—to ...
