Don’t Stop Here

True Marketing & Business Growth Lesson.

From setback after setback after setback to a billion dollar company.

Has to be one of the best growth nuggets and growth lessons ever recorded. You will stand up, cheer for a bit, and reset your targets. It reminds everyone just how close they probably are to success. The lesson is taught by the founder of one of the most beloved boot companies in the world.

This is serious cork-board material and information to share with all those coming behind you.

(0:00 – 0:14)
I’ve just been forgetting about how important having a dream is, a purpose, and what role it plays in a business. I’ve got just some of the most incredible stories to share. Just awesome.

(0:14 – 0:43)
So I want to jump right in. I think I’m going to call it stacking verticals, because you live your life and you run your business in one of three phases. You are either in a storm where the world looks like it’s falling apart and everything’s against you, or you just came out of a storm and you’re light on your feet and everything looks good, feels good, or you’re right now going into a storm and you know it.

(0:43 – 1:03)
So you’re either in a storm, you just came out of a storm, or you’re about to go into a storm and you know it. So I, when I was about 29, seven years in business, I had realized I had almost a midlife crisis at 29 years old. We had, I don’t know how many employees.

(1:03 – 1:28)
We had a few different businesses cooking at the time and 2,200 roughly clients when we hit year 2000. I definitely, I had a midlife, mid-business owner crisis because things were just not so rosy. We had a 19 month period of time where we almost lost everything.

(1:28 – 1:39)
Our average bank account balance in every business was under about three grand. We had a miscarriage. I think you guys heard previous, we had a sales rep, had a heart attack and died in my arms.

(1:40 – 2:00)
We had a really rough patch. It was after all of that had passed, I was out of the storm, starting to think clear, and I realized that I wasn’t a very motivational type of person. I was a work gets me out of anything type of person.

(2:01 – 2:15)
I remember thinking, and it was a weekend, I know I wasn’t feeling like going into the office or anything. I looked at my walls and I had a bunch of cork boards up and it was all like charts and graphs and next weekend. I ripped them all down.

(2:15 – 2:41)
I, right in the middle of my office wall, I put a representation of some of the struggles I had in high school in athletics. Then underneath that, I put a couple pictures of some of the goals I, or excuse me, the records I broke in high school. So at the top, I put high school, I wrote HS and then underneath HS, I put struggles, but pictures representing my struggles.

(2:42 – 2:50)
Then underneath that, I put numeric goals and records that I had and set. So I put a goal of 1140. I broke that record.

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I have, I don’t know how many yards in a season, but I still have the record apparently 25 years later. So I had a bunch of the records that I left high school with. I was the fifth most wins in school’s history in wrestling.

(3:03 – 3:14)
Then I went to college. I made another vertical. So the high school was one vertical and I put some of the struggles I had in college, paying for college, doing this, doing that, some struggles with athletics.

(3:14 – 3:29)
Then again, I did achieve some records in college. So I put the records and some of the pictures with my hall of fame coach and stuff underneath it. Then my early years in business, to say I had struggles would be an understatement.