Winning at Entrepreneurship. Rod Robertson

ROD ROBERTSON CHOSE ME for this foreword because I am a thirty-year veteran of the entrepreneurial world. I have successfully started over thirty businesses (not all made it easy to start) while digesting over 750 business plans and working with hundreds of business owners seeking to find their path to success. I invest my own dollars in each deal so I am fully engaged in this world of buying and owning businesses.

When Rod let me read his book, I instinctively knew it was the right time for such a full-cycle understanding of how to start, grow, and sell a business. Many books have been written about each step in the process, but no author in recent memory has given such an action-packed guide in how to succeed and avoid the many pitfalls that can derail an entrepreneur’s fledgling enterprise.

The timing of this book is impeccable, given the gyrations of valuations and evolution of technology in the marketplace. Your success in raising cash, buying a business, and growing it before heading to a successful exit depends upon understanding current market conditions—what caused the most recent triumphs and failures in your sector. The real-life experiences Rod gives you in the case studies and events depicted in this fascinating book are actually unfolding in today’s workplace and are perhaps your best tools to succeed.

Rod, in owning multiple firms and being involved in over a dozen undertakings at any one time for the last fifteen years, is at the heart of the action. He invests his own money, raises cash for his and others’ transactions, and guides scores of buyers and eventual sellers through the wickets to a successful exit. As a business owner, Rod has also suffered through crash and burns and non-starters. He has earned the right to publish a meaningful learning and teaching guide through his successes and failures. More important, he has a worldly gift for observing, understanding, and conveying to the public how to move forward with their dreams and turn them into reality.

Glenn Hanson

CEO/Founder

Colony Hills Capital

Preface

WE ALL HEAR OF THE MONSTER SUCCESS STORIES of big business blaring from our 24/7 media machines that have engulfed our country. This onslaught fires the engine for any would-be business owner who has a great idea revving up or has the drive to buy a business. Oftentimes, it can also agitate current owners of successful or stalled-out businesses on how to drive their enterprise to their dreamed-of winner’s circle.

The motivation is there, but what is their yellow-brick road?

America is a land of three generations. The online, app-driven generation lives in an exploding world where anything is possible and the blocking and tackling business of yore has become passé. The focus of this new generation, whose members immediately need to jump quickly before becoming eclipsed, has led to a pell-mell and frenetic world of go, go, go! Each day, their sector ripples with excitement of untold riches to be had yet deep-seated concerns of being passed by like-minded leaders on the field.

The older generation, where over 20 percent of new businesses are being formed, comprises those over age fifty. These individuals are predominantly not of the new tech generation, fueled by social media mania. They are executives from the blocking-and-tackling world that has been eclipsed by world developments. These potential business owners have a nest egg they can put into play for one last shot at making a financial windfall, or perhaps they have been downsized or become irrelevant by someone else’s standard. They bring old-world sensibility to the entrepreneurial ranks.

The middle generation is citizens with a leg in each world. They feel the magnetic pull of the social media/app generation yet also worked within the hip business culture of technology fostered in the eighties and nineties. They are a bi-product of the offshore exodus that has morphed the US economy of small businesses into predominantly service-sector firms and are relegated to working at America’s surviving manufacturing entities with “just in time” capabilities.

Although the app generation understands and embraces the newest technologies, the older generations cannot be dismissed in the entrepreneurial world. Far from it. According to Whitney Johnson in “Entrepreneurs Get Better with Age”:

The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. The vast majority—75 percent— have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup,” says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. Meanwhile, data from the Kauffman Foundation indicates the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55-64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.¹

All three generations are plunging into business ownership at a prodigious clip. Certainly the behemoth organizations that dominate the headlines are booming and growing rapidly, but most Americas dream of owning their own business. Never has there been a time in America’s history where more people want to become entrepreneurs or business owners. In the past, this quest for ownership was mostly the domain of the wealthy or tech driven, but now a myriad of reasons ranging from corporate downsizing and lack of viable new job opportunities to the easy ability to access cash are driving the thundering herd of would-be entrepreneurs.

A report issued by Babson and Baruch Colleges and mentioned in Forbes points to an exciting trend in the US. economy:

The percentage of adults involved

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