Essentially, you have to be aware of a crisis happening: 'Can the company go on if I get hit by a bus?' That's, I think, how you build a great company and something that can scale.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Look first at management. That's the key to a company.
You have got to have discipline and focus - on the customer and how you run the business.
Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up - developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.
The best piece of advice I've ever been given was, 'Be in the business you're in.' Don't just be a satellite around it and expect it to come to you. Be in the business you're in.
You don't know what's going to happen in our business a year from now... so you have to be flexible and adaptable, and that's what we try to do.
So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?
The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.
I've been preparing to run a big company all my life.
Give your employees a shot at showing the company a new way, and provide the room for them to chalk up a few small victories. Once they've proved that their idea can work on a limited basis, they can begin to scale it up.
When businesses go through hard times, through down markets, what do they do is they challenge every basic assumption of how they operate. They innovate. They create disruption for a while that leads them to even greater heights when the economy turns around.
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