The program, of course, succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Within months we were selling and provisioning over a thousand new accounts a day. We were one of only three national providers (the other two being public companies who could afford to burn money), and the only one to be offering totally flat-rate service. Finally, we were on the map and Wall Street started to beat a path to our door. Why was I right and all the pundits wrong? Simple. Having been a small businessman for over twenty years, I realized just how creative and competent entrepreneurial businesses actually are. My father, himself an entrepreneur, once told me, “Never underestimate anyone who’s managed to stay in business for a few years. He has to be a genius to overcome all the many crises which keep cropping up all the time.” I’ve never forgotten this advice. I’m sure there are many guys running shoe stores, restaurants, and small trade magazines who could much more competently manage some of America’s industrial giants than they’re currently being managed. After all, these people have had to steer their ship of dreams into unfriendly seas and navigate them profitably against all odds. The ones who succeed are heroes. Not only heroes, but often creative geniuses as well. Many of the people who run large corporations, on the other hand, have never done anything more dramatic than kowtow to their superiors. Is there any doubt in an even fight as to who would prevail? The fact that almost all employment growth in the last twenty years has been from these smaller companies bears out what I’m saying. The only way for big business to really succeed is to incorporate the dynamism of these entrepreneurial personalities within their fold.

Not only, I realized, would our small alliance partners recognize the merit of our new relationship and service all our accounts honestly and well, but they’d bring their dozens of creative ideas and improvements to our company. In a fast-growing industry this would give us an invaluable advantage over our corporate-think competitors. In fact, as things evolved after we went public, most of our premier alliance partners actually folded their businesses into ours and their former owners have become some of our managers. Part of this was no doubt due to the extremely hostile, competitive, and financial situations in which most independent local providers have found themselves. An equally large part, I think, is that having dealt with us for a long period of time, these entrepreneurs know that in coming to work for us they won’t have to sacrifice their independence and put their dreams on hold. Rather, they know they’ll just have more resources at their disposal so they can get the job done.

The alliance partnership program only temporarily relieved our financial problem. True, we didn’t have to buy more equipment, but we now had to pay for national advertising that would cover more than a hundred cities. Signing on Internet accounts was pretty profitable, but it took months till those profits covered the cost of sales and advertising. Ironically, the more accounts we sold in any given month, the bigger our financial problems. And, as before with the IIA, things were going so well that soon we’d be broke.

At this point we needed another great idea. Before telling you what we did, let me ask a question: What exactly is a great idea? Simply a way of reorganizing the assets you already have so you can accomplish something new. Praying or hoping that someone from any planet or someone you never met from the other side of the world will just appear and save you isn’t a great idea. It’s wishful thinking. This is what the Wizard of Oz was trying to tell Dorothy and her friends. The answer to your problem is in your own hands or, in Dorothy’s case, on your own feet. I call this my “ruby-red slippers theory of business”: The answer almost always lies within your own control. You just have to concentrate on how to refocus your resources.