Leaders & Success; IBD's 10 Secrets to Success

Investor's Business Daily

September 26 , 2008

5 Successful entrepreneurs don't score touchdown after touchdown in business. They suffer their fair share of fumbles along the way. Game plans from entrepreneurs who came out on top:

** Take the hit. In his memoir "1,000 Dollars and an Idea," billionaire Sam Wyly compiled lessons he learned building winning computer, oil and gas, restaurant and retail firms. Losses are part of the story.

Take Datran, Wyly's scheme to transmit data through microwaves during the pre-Internet 1970 s. AT&T's stranglehold on the marketplace and a national financial downturn ultimately forced Wyly to shut down the company, but he later won litigation that helped break up AT&T's monopoly.

"First you hurt and you lick your wounds," Wyly told IBD. "Then you get up and say it's a new day."

** Switch it up. Wyly's next company, oil refiner and silver miner Earth Resources, faced a loss when the federal government mandated de-leading gas in the late 1970 s. Wyly called a new play.

"If you had to spend a bunch of engineering money anyway, there were a lot more things you could do with a refinery," Wyly said.

Selling the refinement run-off for jet fuel production turned expense into profit.

** Learn new skills. Successful businesspeople have "adaptive persistence," wrote Christopher Gergen in "Life Entrepreneurs."

He told IBD: "If something knocks them back, then they know how to go about doing something different the next time. They embrace renewal and reinvention."

** Rally your fans. For their book, Gergen and co-author Gregg Vanourek interviewed 55 successful people about their entrepreneurial skills. One was former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner.

Warner had his share of failures; his first business went under in six months and his second tanked in six weeks. What Warner did right was keep talking to people about his ideas. "He had a huge fan base of people who liked his energy," Gergen said. Those supporters spurred Warner as he took a chance brokering cell phone franchise licenses in the 1980 s. That move led to Warner investing early in Nextel, now Sprint Nextel, and co-found Capital Cellular Corp.

** Call timeout. Mark Stevens, author of "Rich Is a Religion," counsels CEOs through downturns, ruts and crises. Two of his clients dealt with the collapse of their businesses by going to the movies.

"They needed to escape," Stevens told IBD. "There's a sense of shame. You want to hide from people and everything."

Both CEOs found solutions between bites of buttered popcorn.

"Your mind wanders and then you have the quiet privacy to think about the route you will take to success again," Stevens said.

** Add some sweat. Movies aren't the only answer. Stevens noticed that winning CEOs get away from the office to consider what-if scenarios and even absurd angles. Stevens likes to hike and think.

"It allows you to open your eyes to a much larger range of possible problems and outcomes," he said. "You will see things you didn't see when you started."