My fellow Opportunity Knocks members, I want to tell you about a consulting engagement I am working on. It’s a family owned company that has been in business since the 1960s. During its heyday, this business was doing almost $30 million a year in revenue. In 2012, it did $14 million. Your first reaction might be, so what, many of us struggled these past few years. Fair enough, but the lesson I want to share is that, today, this business should be doing $30M+ in revenue again, but it failed. I want to share these lessons with you in the hope that they may offer insight into the effective and productive nurturing of your business.

As a business owner and entrepreneur, you are quite familiar with the challenges of starting, running and growing your business. Unfortunately, too often, when success arrives, the entrepreneur moves on to the next “adventure” with dire consequences to the success they created. As a consequence, apathy, complacency and lethargy are waiting to fill the void. Commonly, unmotivated and unqualified leaders become protective, even defensive, about intrusions on, “the way it is.” Well, as business owners, we all should know that the way it is today is not necessarily the way it will be tomorrow.