Quotes from Bo Burlingham

It's also about successfully navigating the four stages of the exit process: Stage one is exploratory. It involves investigating the many possibilities, doing the necessary introspective work, and deciding what you do and don't care about in an exit.

buyout, a gift to your children, a liquidation of assets, or any of the other possible outcomes. Stage four is the transition. It begins with the completion of the deal and ends when you're fully engaged in whatever comes next. Until you've moved on—not just physically but psychologically—to a new venture, a new career, a redefined role, or even retirement, your exit isn't complete.

I've made much more money by choosing the right things to say no to than by choosing things to say yes to," said restaurateur Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group, and he could have been speaking for others. "I measure it by the money I haven't lost and the quality I haven't sacrificed

Success means you're going to have better problems. I'm very happy with the problems I have now.

When contemplating our reader, he reminded us, we needed to take the whole person into account. "I always tried to tell the editors to think of the business person as an artist using both sides of his brain," he said. "You're not just writing for a rational person. You are writing for someone who has the soul of an artist, and his expression is business.

If there's one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with the others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people. They thrive on the joy of contributing something great and unique to the world.

That's their philosophy," said Greder, whose day job was associate dean of students at Illinois Wesleyan. "Dance with the ones who brought you.

I hear other people saying, 'I can't wait for my vacation.' To me, it's a lost day out of your life when you feel that way. It's such a waste to be unhappy when you can wake up in the morning anticipating the day. Your work should be something you enjoy.

Second, the leaders had overcome the enormous pressures on successful companies to take paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow. The people in charge had remained in control, or had regained control, by doing a lot of soul searching, rejecting a lot of well-intentioned advice, charting their own course, and building the kind of business they wanted to live in, rather than accommodating themselves to a business shaped by outside forces.

Third, each company had an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the local city, town, or county in which it did business—a relationship that went well beyond the usual concept of "giving back.

Canadian entrepreneur John Warrillow, who has started five businesses and sold four of them. "I don't believe you are really an entrepreneur until you've exited, because you haven't completed the cycle. You're still standing on third base. It is not about starting. Anyone can start a business. Until you've actually sold one, you haven't touched all the bases.

First, the process will lead you to look for and adopt better business practices, as Ray Pagano did.

Just as important, thinking about an exit plan will force you to ask important, difficult questions about yourself.

Things aren't secret here," Michelle said. "Everything is shared, which makes me feel safe. I know we're not going to get bought out, and I'm not going to lose my job. I hope we never get bought out. I don't want to work for a big corporation. I like ECCO the way it is. I know that if anything terrible happened, ECCO would do whatever it had to do to take care of me and whoever else needed it.

Fourth, they cultivated exceptionally intimate relationships with customers and suppliers, based on personal contact, one-on-one interaction, and mutual commitment to delivering on promises. The leaders themselves took the lead in this regard. They were highly accessible and absolutely committed to retaining the human dimension of the relationships.

Sixth, I was impressed by the variety of corporate structures and modes of governance that these companies had come up with. Because they were private and closely held, they had the freedom to develop their own management systems and practices, and several had done so.

For any competitive individual—and entrepreneurs are competitive by definition—it becomes quite tempting to chase after growth at a certain point in a company's life. The financial indicators are, after all, the most convenient, and objective, measures of success available. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you're maximizing growth, you're also maximizing success. It feels like you're winning, and who doesn't like to win?

Keeping the team small also relieved Maytag of some management chores. New people who weren't working out didn't have to be fired. They would leave of their own accord. They simply couldn't last in a small group of people without the support of their peers. Conversely, those who meshed with the culture were embraced by the group and given more responsibility, with Maytag scarcely having to say a word.

Brodsky couldn't accept the notion that an industry, any industry, was closed to new competition. He realized that if he was going to get anywhere in records storage, he would have to come up with an approach to the business different from that of the established records-storage providers. That meant using his peripheral vision, looking at the business this way and that until he saw something that everybody else was missing.