I spent most of my life as a late stage small business turnaround specialist. What does that mean? When companies were facing things like called bank loans, had partners fighting each other, didn't know how they were going to make payroll a week from Friday or other such impending disasters, someone would call me. I attempted 38 corporate turnarounds (both large and small). Twenty-seven of those succeeded.

I had no training for the career I've had. I did have some early luck though. Later, I think I got good at the building a profitable business game.

For a variety of reasons that don't really matter here I decided to give up my consulting business in 1999. Since then I've sat on the other side of the desk. I currently act as CEO of seven small businesses. I own all or a portion of each. None of them will ever be huge - hyper growth isn’t the goal.

As I enter my seventh decade, I've decided to take a new approach. Life has been good to me and it's time to give back. In the past, people paid large sums of money just to buy my attention so I could solve their business problems one-on-one. Now, I've decided to disseminate the things I've learned over almost 40 years in business on a one-to-many basis. Therein lies, in my probably not very humble opinion, your opportunity. I have created this site, costing only a few dollars per month per member, with the goal of teaching a lot of people some of the things I've been lucky enough to learn.

What can be learned from a place like this? Well, I believe,

ü       Focus

ü       The process of the mastermind group

ü       Dedication

ü       The ability to concentrate on the strategic as well as the tactical

ü       Luck

ü       Brilliant marketing

ü       Support

ü       Mis-steps by competitors

ü       Financing avenues

ü       Innovation

ü       Research and development

ü       Knowing the few things in every business that give an accurate picture of how the overall business is doing

ü       And everything else revolving around running a profitable small business

It will come from books; but rarely schoolbooks.

How much fun will we have hanging out with each other here learning the things we need to know to grow our profitable small business?  A lot.

We all think our business problems are unique. Folks, get over it. Your problems are almost certainly NOT UNIQUE. If we put 50 people in a room and frankly discussed the biggest three problems each of the 50 has trying to attain or maintain profitability in their small business, we would probably have somewhere between 10 and 15 unique challenges among the group. Those problems are not easy to solve, but they are almost always solvable.

This is going to be a place where small-business people can come together and comfortably talk about their problems. I will help. They will help each other.

I cannot tell you how strongly I feel that small business is the most important part in both the American and world economies. I further believe not nearly enough attention is paid to grooming nascent businesspeople into seasoned executives who make profits quarter after quarter.

I don't care if you run a small business in Davenport, Iowa or Cornwall, England or in some small town in the Sahara desert. You are suffering from the same short list of problems as all of the others on this planet. We can't solve them all, but we can make a dent in a lot of them.

And, I promise, we will have some fun along the way!