Bounce!

Conventional business wisdom tells you that there’s always something to learn from failure. Not true, says Barry Moltz. Sometimes, failure just stinks. Bounce! explains how success and failure are simply normal outcomes in the regular lifecycle of a business and that process over the long term matters far more than individual outcomes. This book shows you how to build a business that can “bounce” through these cycles for long-term success. If you run a business, better make it Bounce!

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1 Get Ready for Adventure: You Have Never Heard a Speaker Like This Before 1

Chapter 2 Archetypes of Success: Be Careful What You Wish For 11

Chapter 3 I ’ve Got Your One-Hit Wonder: 867-5309 31

Chapter 4 The World from Here: Start Where You Are 39

Chapter 5 Forget the Archetypes: Messy Lines Teach Humility 51

Chapter 6 Failure is an Option: Flying Fear in Formation 83

Chapter 7 Embracing Failure When It Happens 101

Chapter 8 Failure Provides Choices 119

Chapter 9 Do It Anyway: Be a Smart Risk Taker 139

Chapter 10 A Little DAB Will Do Ya! Drive, Accept, and Build 153

Chapter 11 Goal Setting: Establishing Your Own Scorecard 165

Chapter 12 No Longer Black and White: Measure for Success in Technicolor 179

Chapter 13 Read This Book—Then Throw It Away 201

Afterword 209

Summary: The Ten Building Bands for True Business Confidence 213

Biographies of Featured Less-than-Famous Businesspeople 215

Notes 227

Index 235

BARRY J. MOLTZ has founded and run businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than fifteen years. After successfully selling his last operating business, he founded an angel investor group and an angel fund, and is a former advisor to the Board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation. He has been elected to the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame and is currently a business consultant and an internationally acclaimed speaker. He is also the author of You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business, which is available in five languages.

To contact Barry or for the free companion workbook to Bounce!, go to www.barrymoltz.com.

"Bounce! will transform fears into confidence and define your own brand of success. Brilliant!"
—DR. JOE VITALE, author of The Attractor Factor

Bounce! is about developing confidence, but not just any sort of confidence. It's about developing the kind of true business confidence that prepares you for both failure and success.

But this is not a book about coming back from failure.

Comeback books have been written many times before. The comeback is romanticized in society and totally overrated. In Bounce!, you'll learn about accepting failure as a normal part of the process even when there isn't something to learn from it. Failure that offers no real learning value jolts the business belief system.

In Bounce!, entrepreneur and business owner Barry Moltz explains that both success and failure are simply outcomes in the normal life cycle of business—a life cycle in which overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Great businesses are those that develop the resiliency to bounce through these cycles to succeed over the long term. Using a blend of personal experience and firsthand interviews with business leaders, Moltz shares the practical tools and techniques that every business needs to survive the cycle of ups and downs. In Bounce!, you'll learn the "building bands" for true business confidence, including:

• Using humility to "right size" your ego
• Making fear fly in formation
• Using choices to embrace failure when it happens
• The art of more effective risk-taking
• How process trumps outcome
• Setting patient goals to establish your own scorecard
• Creating your own brand of success

Bounce! lets you move forward from any event, situation, or outcome—good or bad—to the next place where a decision can be made based on the choices currently available to you. Bounce! allows us to be passionately excited and intensely enthusiastic about our business and our lives.