Small Business, Big Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right

What past experience has led you to be able to write a book on entrepreneurship?

My brother, (Adam/Matthew), and I have been entrepreneurs since we were seven and eight years old. From our first venture, selling these little airplane gliders at a local festival, we moved on to importing electronics and selling them at school. By the time we were in high school, we were very popular, because everyone knew we were the guys to go to, to get a great stereo for your car or a cool boom box.

Since that time, we’ve never not been involved in an entrepreneurial venture. We’ve owned everything from a pool hall to a magazine publishing company and from a print shop to successful web sites. We’ve also partnered with a number of up-and-coming entrepreneurs on their ventures and coached a wide range of business owners on starting and running a successful business. Throughout the years, we have learned through hands-on experience what works and what doesn’t work, and we love nothing more than sharing that knowledge with established business owners and would-be entrepreneurs alike.

Is Small Business, BIG Vision meant for new or seasoned business owners?

When we outlined and wrote the book, we intentionally included a lot of powerful information that is valuable to entrepreneurs at any stage of business. For example, our chapter on business plans isn’t just for someone about to start a business. We designed our business plan strategy to help anyone create an actionable plan for starting a company or improving their existing business.

True entrepreneurs never stop learning, and we wrote the book with them in mind. The information is easy to understand, but it’s not elementary by any means. So from startup through exit, we’re confident that any business owner will benefit from the information presented in Small Business, BIG Vision.

You and your brother, (Adam/Matthew), have been entrepreneurs your whole lives. How did you get started?

Our grandfather, Joe, was instrumental in getting us interested in business ownership. When we were in elementary school, he set us up selling these little glider airplanes called Dipper Dos at a local folk festival. We learned how to really wow the crowd with the tricks we could make the planes do, and we sold out quickly. It was a great feeling for a couple of 7 and 8 year old kids, and from there we were hooked.

We were very fortunate to have the full support of our grandfather and our mother throughout our early ventures. They never told us we should just get jobs or pressured us to avoid the risks of entrepreneurship. They encouraged us to work hard and always do the right thing, and they always let us know they were behind us 100%. Having that kind of support ourselves is a major reason why we wrote the book Kidpreneurs. We want everyone to have the opportunity we had to succeed in whatever business they choose to start.

What was your motivation behind writing Small Business, BIG Vision?

For the past several years, our focus has been on helping entrepreneurs start and manage their own businesses. We founded YoungEntrepreneur.com and Blogtrepreneur.com to make an impact in the lives of entrepreneurs, and we’ve done a fair amount of work through our BizWarriors.com brand to get involved more intimately with the entrepreneurial challenges of small business owners. Also, our first book, Kidpreneurs, is all about fostering the entrepreneurial spirit from a young age.

So writing a book to expand our reach and help even more entrepreneurs seemed like the next logical step. Small Business, BIG Vision was written to be easy to understand, straight-forward, and packed with practical, actionable information. Rather than spotlight our own story or even the stories of the entrepreneurs we profiled, we focused on providing quality advice that any entrepreneur can use to start or improve his or her business. The book talks a lot about vision, and our vision for Small Business, BIG Vision is to make a meaningful impact in the businesses and lives of millions of entrepreneurs around the world.

You profile several successful entrepreneurs in your new book. Can you tell us about a few of them?

We’re really honored to have been able to talk with a number of entrepreneurs who we’ve admired for a long time. They were very generous with their time and their advice, and we couldn’t be more grateful. Folks like Gary Vaynerchuk of DailyGrape.com, Shama Hyder Kabani of Zen Marketing, and Gabriel Shaoolian of Blue Fountain Media are all very busy entrepreneurs who were willing to share their secrets for success with our readers. We were also fortunate to include Ali Brown, Mike Mickiewicz, Dan Schawbel, Anita Campbell, and several more highly respected entrepreneurs.

One of my favorite stories is that of Scott Harrison of charity: water. From literally nothing, Scott has built an amazing non-profit company that has helped bring clean drinking water to over a million people around the world. His story is truly remarkable, and he’s an incredible guy. Scott and many of the featured entrepreneurs in the book will definitely be inspiring to any reader.

In the book, you talk about advisory boards. What are they, and why are they important?

Advisory boards just might be the most useful tool that’s overlooked by a large percentage of entrepreneurs. Even though entrepreneurs can tend to be very independent by nature, bringing on an advisory board can be one of the best decisions a business owner can make. An advisory board is made up of professionals with a range of expertise, often including marketing, finance, legal, and strategy, to name a few. During regularly scheduled meetings, the board, which has no actual control over the company, discusses ideas and plans for moving the business forward in the direction the entrepreneur has envisioned. Similar to a mastermind group, an advisory board brings several minds together to solve problems, plan for the future, and generally advise the business in whatever area necessary.

We advocate advisory boards as an alternative to investors in many cases. While the way a board is structured and compensated varies, it’s almost always more advantageous than relinquishing part of your company to a group of investors. In fact, often the agreement with advisory board members doesn’t include any compensation. You’d be surprised how many seasoned professionals are eager to help fellow business owners in any way they can.

As the co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com and Blogtrepreneur.com, what lessons have you learned about running online businesses?

We’ve been running online companies for twelve years now, and the learning never stops. The industry changes at such a rapid pace that you have to stay on top of it and expect just about anything at any time. But ultimately, the principles of good business apply regardless of the type of business you have. If you do everything with integrity and a drive to be the best, you can’t go wrong.

In the online world, the biggest difference is the type of connection you can have with your audience or customers. Whether you’re talking about social media or blogging, there’s an ability to engage with people in a way that other forms of business typically don’t offer – or at least not on the scale that the internet does. So the most important lesson I’ve learned is that the more you connect with your audience in the way they want to connect, the more successful you’ll be. It’s that simple.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as a business owner, and what did you learn?

When we first started YoungEntrepreneur.com, we hired a web design firm to design the site, they asked for a large portion of the cost upfront. At the time, we thought that was reasonable. This was twelve years ago, so industry best practices were still up in the air to a large extent. The problem was that we didn’t have a contract detailing exactly what they were going to do for us, the deadlines to get it done, and a service level agreement to protect us if they flaked out. Unfortunately, they did indeed flake out a large extent, and we hadn’t taken the steps necessary to have any legal protection and get our money back.

Now, although we’re not distrusting of people we deal with, we take precautions to make sure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed. Anyone who starts and runs a business is bound to make mistakes, no matter how many times you’ve done it or what kind of experience you have. It just comes with the territory. The key is to learn from your mistakes so you don’t repeat them. 

In Small Business, BIG Vision, you ask each entrepreneur you profiled how they define success. How do you define success?

We ask almost everyone we interview that question, the range of answers is pretty interesting. We get a lot of answers that talk about balance, some that focus primarily on business success, and a few that primarily think of success in terms of money in the bank. So we’ve found that the definition is different for each person.

For me, true success has to cover four important areas of my life: Family, business, health, and money. I feel successful right now, because I have great family relationships, I’m in great physical health, I’m having a blast with all our business ventures, and financially, I can take my family on trips, spend plenty of time with my kids, and not have to worry about paying the bills each month. If any one of those areas was to fail, I wouldn’t feel like I had achieved success. I know people with a lot of money, who are miserable, and I know others who have health problems or money worries, and it’s hard to feel successful with any of that going on.