It's Time to Get What You Want from Your Business

I was the worst player on my high school varsity basketball team. The coach put me on the team, not for my miserable jump shot, but because, as he told me,  “You’re not afraid to fight with the big boys under the boards.”  I didn’t care that I only played five minutes a game. I had two useful elbows, and I considered any ball bouncing off the rim or backboard my personal property.

Entrepreneurship is kind of like a scrappy basketball game.  Most people who play aren’t superstars. They just know how to survive long enough to figure it out. I’ve always had an affinity for those kinds of people.  My dad, for example, took over my grandfather’s deli on the fashionable upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1950s and worked it seven days a week to turn it into the premier fancy food shop and catering service of the 1950s-1970s. He, along with my brother, then morphed it into the #2 party equipment rental company in NYC, eventually selling to private equity in the early 2000s. It was an “overnight” success story that took 40 years.

If you’re a knocked-down-seven-times-got-up-eight kind of business builder, but you’d like to stop getting beat up quite so much, we’ll likely get along.