A huge percentage of small businesses fail. That’s heartbreaking for me, as my business has been so significant and life-changing for me and my family. I’m not sure what goes wrong with all those businesses, but I think too many people get stuck planning.
I started a graphic design and screen printing business in my garage while in medical school and have grown it to a business that produced just over 6.5 million dollars in revenue in 2017. But my story started long before that.
In 2015, my wife, Holly, was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer. Like everything else in my life, both personal and working, there were lessons to be learned from that experience. First, life is too short and cancer doesn’t discriminate. You see, at the time, Holly was a two-time Ironman Finisher training for her third. I was the complete opposite. It was the jolt I needed to take care of myself.
I often refer to myself as a recovering CFO. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and lived in multiple countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, and Sudan. I spent most of childhood in Tucson, Arizona, where I attended the University of Arizona to study accounting and finance.
As a PR firm that works with political candidates, nonprofits, global corporations, and others, we often get asked what companies should be doing to improve their digital footprint. There’s an old journalism expression that says, “Today’s newspaper wraps tomorrow’s fish.” It means that whatever story appeared in the newspaper today would be forgotten tomorrow and simply used to wrap fish at the fish market.
Let’s be honest: there are a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t start out with the intention of becoming business owners. Life circumstances change; opportunity knocks, and people who went to college to study an industry so they can work in that industry suddenly find themselves launching a business.
I read a book a day, but I hope you won’t hold that against me. My business, readitfor.me, takes best-selling business and personal development books and turns them into twelve-minute audio, video, and text files. So you can imagine that how people learn is very important to me. The story of how I got to where I am today has a few twists and turns.
Have you ever been to a store where it was clear the clerk didn’t like people? In our years working and consulting in the shooting sports industry, we have certainly met our fair share of retailers who don’t seem to like people or the work they do every day. We’ve also met our fair share of business owners who don’t have a business philosophy and have simply never thought about it, which usually means they don’t have a very good culture either.
Who is your audience and what need are you filling?
When running a business or working in sales, it’s important to know who your audience is and what need you are filling for them. To illustrate that, allow me tell you a little bit about how we got into the shooting sports industry.