Read more here.

“To succeed in business today, you need to have everything going for you. This great book is full of practical,
proven strategies and techniques that will give you an edge in any market.” ~ Brian Tracy, Founder, Brian Tracy International, Author of The Way to Wealth and other titles

With the country in an economic slump, the number of new small businesses being started is at a 14 year high. Business owners seeking an edge need to look no further than Tipping the Odds for the Entrepreneur. The content holds true to the title, providing a compendium of valuable wisdom from author and business owner Kevin C. Maki.

After more than 25 years of studying entrepreneurs, as well as running business units and his own companies, Kevin Maki has identified key concepts about small business success that consistently separate the top performers from the rest of the pack.  Thriving as an entrepreneur is rarely due to luck, and there is no business gene.  Instead, he attributes success to “learning and applying the knowledge and skills necessary to attract, serve and retain profitable customers.” These big ideas are described and illustrated with many stories from his own experiences, as well as profiles of business owners who run their companies in a manner consistent with the recommendations in the book.

This book explores what separates the few high performing small business entrepreneurs from the many who find long-term success elusive.  Business owners nationwide concur:  bestselling author of How to be a Fierce Competitor and founder of Fox & Company, Inc. Jeffrey J. Fox states, “Wow! This is THE big book on succeeding in a small business. Chapter 20 alone is worth the price for all current and future entrepreneurs.”

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Author: Kevin C. Maki, PhD is the founder, President and Chief Science Officer of Provident Clinical Research & Consulting, Inc. and owner of a successful property management company. He is the author or co-author of five books and hundreds of published articles on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to preventive medicine.

As Steve says, the book is not what you could call a step by step manual to follow if you want to become an entrepreneur; it’s a collection of stories that portrait the real life of an entrepreneur: long working hours, living a frugal life to succeed, hiring, looking for customers and being a janitor.

The book starts by saying about Mitos, the company that Steve created with no outside investment, and sold after 6 years. What is amazing is that without being a detailed description of Mitos life, Steve manages to get to very detailed aspects of running a small business: like discovering that as an entrepreneur you sometimes don’t have the greatest pay in the company, and you have to clean the office. Steve does this by using outside examples from other companies he got in contact.

So what is “We are all born entrepreneurs” about?

Discovering if you are fit to be entrepreneur or a 9 to 5. That’s sometimes easy to discover, but most people are afraid to step outside the society conventions (paying for an expensive lifestyle) and take the entrepreneurial path.

Cultivating entrepreneurial behavior to your children. That’s not about MBA’s, but about learning you are in control of your destiny, or at least able to influence it.

Failure as a learning process. As Steve says, people are not necessarily afraid of failing but about the repercussions this could have on the lifestyle. Starting young it’s better because you don’t have big commitments like supporting a family and give you more time to fail until you make it right.

Hiring the right person for a small business. When working for a small business employees need sometime to adjust their mindsets. Failing to hire the people with the right mindsets it’s entrepreneur’s fault.

Motivating employees. It’s not about the money or about recognition sometimes. Steve explains what would be some good organization models.

Partnering with the right persons or starting all alone. Ways of making sure the partners will fulfill their part in growing the business.

Difference between exiting the business at a loss or as a winner. What’s wrong with assumptions about profit, market value and where people fail when pitching for investment.

And many more. Every business and entrepreneur has it’s own story but I found that We are all born entrepreneurs does a good job of getting the big picture through day by day details of the typical small business entrepreneur.

Luckily for me, there is now a book called “We are All Born Entrepreneurs” and I got the chance to interview the author, Steve Welch about the book and his discoveries about entrepreneurs.

Read the interview here.

Following the sale of Mitos, Steve co-founded DreamIt Ventures, a firm based in Philadelphia that helps entrepreneurs get their business ideas up and off the ground by providing them all the resources needed for success. Steve is also an Eisenhower Fellow who is traveling to countries around the globe to develop the best practices to spur entrepreneurship.

We Are All Born Entrepreneurs is available for purchase online at Amazon.com.  To learn more about Steve and We Are All Born Entrepreneurs, please visit, www.weareallbornentrepreneurs.com.”

Steve’s upcoming book tour is kicking off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, May 4 at The Ultimate Networker Event, and at The Mezz Bar at Union Trust Steakhouse on Friday, May 7.

Cristian: Hi Weldon and welcome on Entrepreneurship Interviews. I had the chance to read and review your book The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty, and Addiction. So what is the book about?

Weldon: Well, it’s really a book about how we can all live our dreams if we are deeply committed to achieving them. In a nutshell, I spent 20 years broke, homeless and drunk. I was your garden variety loser who spent 13 years in prison. About halfway through my “prison years” my father died and I decided to change the course of my destiny and that’s what I did. In fact, I walked out of the joint in 2003 without a dime to my name, built an Inc 5000 company with over $20,000,000 in sales and got a home on Maui. The book outlines the journey and the tools I used to transform my life.

Read the rest of the interview here.

I soon discovered that the book it’s more like a thriller book, because for the first half it’s actually describing the crimes done by the author for which he has convicted more than 13 years. But this first half does an excellent job at saying that taking control of your life and create the life of your dreams is in your hands, no matter how you might be living today. This is exactly why you can’t let it go until you finish reading – I could hardly wait to see how can you turn from being so low to being a successful entrepreneur.

Reading the book I realized it resonates with so many things I believe and write myself here on the Small Business Entrepreneurship blog. Take for example the fear on entrepreneurship – keeps most people of following their dreams and become what they have envisioned. But what if it’s all in your head and you live your life being in the prison of your own mind? Who is actually in the prison, the fellow that was drinking drugging and committing crimes but decided to take responsibility for the quality and circumstances of his life?

Another thing that I discovered through my series of Entrepreneur Interviews is that waiting for “a better moment” to start a business never puts you in a successful position – don’t think things will somehow happen. Actually doing something good or not so good means that you achieved something, instead of waiting for things to happen. As Weldon says, stop thinking there is something special about you and just wait for things to happen.

Then, there is something else I discovered while talking with people willing to become entrepreneurs and never had the courage to do it: they think that successful entrepreneurs have something special, some ideas and abilities or even luck and this won’t be happening to them. Weldon, now having a dream house in Maui, having run multi-million dollar companies born out of nothing says he is “an average guy living a spectacular life”. And admits that no matter how successful entrepreneurs are it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges and problems to solve: “the difference between successful people and losers is not the nature of their problems; it’s the nature of their responses to those problems. I came to understand that I had absolute control over how I responded to problems”.

I found amazing the way Weldon changed his perception about life in general while being in prison. I think that actually being in prison worked in his favor – he was at the absolute lowest and the only way out was up or dying. Problem is that most of the people live in the prison made out by society – you get the fake feeling that you are free to do whatever you want but actually forced to act following the society “models of success” – working a 9 to 5 job, buying a house, a second car and spend your life useless to your retirement. And because of the fake “freedom feeling” you don’t put yourself in motion to live the life you dream to have. And as Weldon says about him starting to improve his life “what was amazing was that the only thing that had changed was the way I thought about things”.

I’m not going to tell you about the process Weldon took to change his life. You should read the book because your way of understanding the process might be different from mine and you should discover things that relate better with your inner feelings. I do have the feeling that this might be an unfinished book – I never read a motivational book in a hurry to see how it ends - and I feel like waiting for the sequel.  I will definitively keep an eye on what comes next in Weldon life.

With much of our knowledge about US entrepreneurship coming from the movie industry, great entrepreneurship stories escape the public, although they represent the real American dream. Unlike other books I’ve read lately, many following the getting rich quick book pattern I was happy to see that Sam’s Wyly book doesn’t follow a script. Each chapter starts and ends on it’s own, without having the same structure with the others, while the book itself it’s not what you could call motivational, nor “selling” ways to turn $1,000 into millions. The truth and wisdom you could find reading the chapters are not replicable, you can’t build your business the same. But they might make you smarter and give you some insights of the hard work that an entrepreneur needs to put in order to achieve his goals.

Did you know that Sam Wyly was amongst the first to fight IBM during their supremacy years in the ’60 when a computer was costing around $ 3 million? Did you know that Sam Wyly fought the big AT&T monopoly when you couldn’t even buy a different headset and lost 100 million to it? Did you know that he owned the Bonanza food chain and grow it from 20 restaurants to more than 600? Did you know that Sam started a company called Sterling Software with an initial investment of 2 million to sell it later for… 8 billions! Just before the dot com crash.

In the early 1970s, in the midst of the Nixon wage and price controls, Wyly built University Computing into a goliath that split into four separate companies, including Datran, which would later challenge the AT&T data transmission monopoly. During the gas crisis of the late 1970s, Sam’s oil-refining and silver mining company Earth Resources actually took advantage of the call to de-lead gasoline by selling the refinement run-off for jet fuel. During the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sam built arts & crafts retailer Michaels from six stores to over 900. In the current economic downturn, Sam’s latest ventures are all proving successful. From Green Mountain Energy, the nation’s leading provider of cleaner energy, to investment funds Ranger Capital and Maverick Capital, Sam’s still on the leading edge of the market.

As Sam Wyly says, he was born in one of the poorest small towns in US. His first business, University Computing was started with $1,000 and an idea. He is amongst the 600 most rich people now, but he keeps on saying: “In football, just like in business and just like in life, the best teacher of all is failure.” “No matter who you are or what you’ve achieved in the past, you have to work hard every time in order to win. ”

I’m not sure how much you know about how the Internet appeared, but I now know that by fighting AT&T and creating the first data transmission service for computers, Sam Wyly set the first stone of what we call today Internet, even before the army launched the project that will later become the internet. And not sure how the world would be today without entrepreneurs fighting big corporations like IBM and finding better ways of solving people pains – the quite essence of what we call today entrepreneurship.

Consider it a history book about the last century economics, consider it a business book, it definitively worth reading. Thanks Sam Wyly for sharing a true and genuine entrepreneurship story: 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire

The book talks about the “Natural Enterprise” -  a new type of business that emerge – a subject that is made more and more valid by the current crisis and the changes that need to be made. There is only one way to read the book – don’t jump chapters – everything makes more sense when you turn the last page.

I think I’ve actually got interested in what the book is saying after reading the story of a dog that was treated badly by the owner and still, he returned day after day at home, because he didn’t know anything differently. Slowly the book goes on saying that we, like the dog, keep on doing jobs that we don’t like because we don’t know anything differently. Then you realize the meaning of the book subtitle: “A guide to finding where your gifts, passions and purpose intersect”.

So there is a way to turn your hate for the job you have into a happy story by forming what the book calls “natural enterprise” – a better way to make a living. “Natural enterprises are flat, nonhierarchical, independent cooperative organizations with a shared Purpose, complementary Gifts and Passions, uncommon core capacities and a shared vision”. “A sustainable self-organized, self-managed community based business partnership in which a group of people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for this or her personal well being”.

The book has 3 major chapters:

• Discovering what you are meant to do – what are your passions, gifts and purpose
• Creating natural work – how to apply your passions, gifts and purpose to create a new business
• Making it sustainable – the way the new enterprise would work.

I now have to come back to the story with the dog. That put me into heavy thinking the entire week. What if the values we are trying to achieve throughout our lives like getting a home, car, having a family with a dog or being in a top management position are just limitations imposed by the society? What if my destiny of being a middle manager is completely wrong and I didn’t actually found my real destiny yet? Am I going to be 50 when realizing I’ve spent most of my life worthless?

What if the book is right?

First, how do you get this type of customers? Quite easy I would say. Some are from the first day of running the business when you thought that everything that flies should be your customer. Some are simply bad sales deals. Some just turn bad somewhere in the process.

I always said the ideal situation is when you can say no to customers, but I didn’t have enough things to argument this idea until I found it argumented already in Mike MIchalowicz book: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.

At page 100, Mike puts an interesting question: while in High School, who were the most interesting girls? Haha! The ones you couldn’t get!

“You must commit to saying no to all those crappy clients, bottom feeding prospects and unfit opportunities this year. Saying no is all about sustaining your absolute focus.” then goes ahead and gives some real examples on how saying no actually helped some companies improve their businesses like Buy Rite Inc that at some point decided to say no to all mighty Wal Mart.

Anyway, actually the entire book is quite interesting to read, especially now that money are scarce. Mike said in the interview I had the chance to have with him:

“Cristian: You told me that entrepreneurs that start business on the cheap, with little or no investment could have an advantage over the entrepreneurs. Can you explain?

Mike: Not just and advantage, but a HUGE advantage.  The reason is that money is simply an amplifier of habits.  It allows you to do what you want faster and stronger.  But it also clouds problems, because it gives you the freedom to continue doing things that aren’t working.  That is, until the money runs out.  So, ironically, when we have less money we are smarter and use it more prudently.  When we have less money we use our minds more to stretch every dollar the distance.

Listen, no money puts you in hunting mode.  You are hungry from day one.  And someone that is hungry will go out and will approach things in a different, unorthodox way to make money.  The person that walks in with lots of cash, doesn’t have to hunt immediately and isn’t punished for being lazy or making mistakes.  I bet on the person living their passion and without a penny to their name over the funded players every time.”

Coming back to the book, most business books I had the chance to read, either have a motivational role and put you in the right mindset to start and run a business but hardly say anything of value about the actual running of the business, or the other way around, are way to theoretical to push you to start a business.

The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is a little bit different. It spends almost half of the pages in a mind setting mission, and the other half tell you stuff to do to. I don’t think that the book is for common thinking people as one of the concepts behind it is that you should think that your business will generate $5 million in the next 2 years, and if you think this is impossible, you just hit the wall of limiting beliefs as Mike says in the book.

$5 million looks good. It actually made me read the book. Really.

You can read the
Interview with Mike Michalowicz, Author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur here.

Find out more about Sam Wyly’s Entrepreneur Contest and Book Giveaway here.