I figure anything over 13 weeks in this business is pretty good.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Spend the first six to 12 months building a great product or service that people love, rather than chasing investors. When the time comes to engage investors, you will be meeting them from a position of strength. This makes all the difference.
In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.
I'm trying to have some longevity in this business. If that means not working for a while and just picking the right job, so be it.
I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.
If you don't operate it as a business, you aren't going to be around very long.
You can't go into business thinking that success will come to you in just one or two years.
I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines.
It would be troubling if everything is determined by whether profits will be made within five to six years.
I spent 26 years in the business without ever knowing what I was doing a month from now.
There's no way you can predict what is going to happen in six months or two years in most businesses, and certainly not for businesses that are growing at the rate that we have grown.