As if the answer to all of the frustrations most small business owners experience is somehow tied to particular people.

Sarah said, “I hate to beat a dead horse, but what if I want to do the technical work in my business? What if I don’t want to do anything else but that?” “Then for God’s sake,” I said as emphatically as I dared, “get rid of your business! And get rid of it as quickly as you can. Because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t ‘have your pie and eat

And the degree to which they buy into your game doesn’t depend on them but on how well you communicate the game to them—at the outset of your relationship, not after it’s begun.

“The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

That your Primary Aim and your Strategic Objective and your Organizational Strategy and your Management Strategy and your People Strategy and your Marketing Strategy and your Systems Strategy—all of them are totally interdependent, rather than independent of one another. That the success of your Business Development Program totally depends on your

He was running the business for him, not for me. And by doing so, he was depriving me of the experience

To the technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure, a business is not a business but a place to go to work.

it is truly the path of life, or, as Rollo May might have called it, “the path of freedom.” He said: “Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘to become what we truly are.’”1

Demographics is the science of marketplace reality. It tells you who your customer is.