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The author of “Bounce!” shares his unconventional wisdom on success and failure

Barry Moltz has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. After successfully selling his last operating business, Barry has branched out into a number of entrepreneurship-related activities. He founded an angel investor group, an angel fund, and is a former advisory member of the board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation.

His second book, Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, was published in January 2008. I caught up with him to discuss some of the unconventional wisdom he shares in it about defining success and dealing with failure.

Scott Allen: There have been dozens of books written about comebacks and turnarounds. What makes Bounce! different?

Barry Moltz: This is not a book about coming back from failure.

In fact, I say this in bold on the jacket cover. You need to Bounce not Bounce Back! This is about letting go so you can see failure and success as just part of a business cycle I don’t believe that we bounce back. That is too simple. The business world is not structured in a linear way. Bounce! is about letting go of what you were taught was the secret path to succeed in business. Letting go of the idea that something to learn comes from failure or that you can always duplicate your success. Let go of the shame of losing and the enlarged ego that comes with a big win. If we let go of whatever the last result was, we can actually Bounce! We can learn what — if anything — from the last success or failure and get ready by bouncing to the next decision that we have to make. Any success or failure is just a part of the entire business lifecycle. Individually, a particular result or outcome actually means nothing. No event will guarantee the same result in the future.

SA: It seems almost oxymoronic… the US economy is based on entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs have become elevated to the level of other celebrities. And yet, when you look at business closure rates, the odds are against you when you start a business.

BM: That is why we need to look at our business life as crooked filled with success and failure.

SA: And there are some high-profile examples of this, right? I mean, Trump… Branson… even after their huge successes, they’ve had some huge failures.

BM: We’re taught it’s a straight line — work hard and then you will make a fortune. There are some examples of this like Bill Gates but for most of us it does not work. Most of the people like Trump and Simon Cowell have had a lot of failure. But there isn’t always something to learn from failure sometime it just sucks. Failure is not a prerequisite to success. Then of course there are one-hit wonders.

SA: You talk about those in the book — I loved that analogy. Give me an example. What’s the “867-5309″ of the entrepreneurial world?

BM: The guy from Apple Steve Wozniak, also Ray Raymond from Victoria’s Secret. Ray jumped off a bridge – very sad.

SA: And yet Steve Jobs is still going strong.

BM: Perhaps it was Jobs that had the magic. But we never hear about the people that succeed once and then just fail, or sometimes we call them one-hit wonders. We also love the comeback story – the underdog like Rocky or J. K. Rowlings. But if they never comeback, we never hear their story.

SA: But you also say in the book that you only need one great success to be remembered — that they remember you for your success, not your failures.

BM: That’s true, the point is it does not matter how many times we fail. Wayne Gretsky said that we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. We just need to hit it big once and if we can do that early in our career sometimes it give us the confidence to go the distance. This is really what bounce is about — developing the true business confidence — don’t base it on a specific success or failure.

SA: You say a few things in the book that flaunt conventional wisdom, for example, “Having too much will make you stupid.”

BM: The rich don’t always get richer. You past success will not guarantee your future success. A third of all lottery winners go bankrupt within five years because they don’t know how to handle their sudden wealth. I know, if you won, it would be different. You would be part of the other two-thirds. The old saying that “Necessity truly is the mother of invention” applies to every one of our lives. Having limited resources will ultimately make us more creative in solving our challenges. There’s a good video on my web site on this: Striving for Minimal Achievement.

SA: To paraphrase Peter Senge, the gap between your current “here” and the desired “there” is the source of creative tension to pull you toward your goal.

BM: We are always comparing ourselves to others and the problem is that there is always someone smarter, richer or better looking.

SA: Here’s another swipe at conventional wisdom: “Skip the logo design, take a step.”

BM: We spend too much time planning. We need to value action — we need to outlaw premeditated business! We need to go out and ask customers – will they buy? That’s what matters. All the other stuff is just junk.

SA: That’s a lot easier advice to give to a bootstrapping sole proprietor than to someone who just received 7 figures of venture capital.

BM: They are at different stages. The VC is taking it to the next level; they are not at the beginning. I never spent more than $500 on a logo to begin — didn’t know if the company would be around.

SA: What about someone with, say, 5 figures of friends and family money?

BM: Well, you got to decide where you want to spend THEIR Cash. I think you’ve got to look good enough but not superior. Good enough is totally underrated. That is why we need to strive for minimal achievement. Get a toehold towards the goal — FOCUS.

SA: I know about this firsthand!

BM: We all do if we admit it. It is better to make money for your family then lose it.

SA: Right now, my company website is still just a community site that we started 8 months ago as a way to get some of the industry thought leaders together. We’re closing 5 and 6-figure consulting deals, but if you go to our domain, it’s still not really clear what we actually DO.

BM: And my web site is all in WordPress!

SA: I think one of the most important points you make in the book is this: With failure and fear comes choice. Explain.

BM: Yes, failure can be looked as an escape hatch. Failure gives an ending and an opportunity to continue on or go in a different direction. What we fear the most is that we do not have choices. We always (almost always) have choices and that can be reassuring. And I think we have to reassure people that fear is okay. Too many times in our society we say NO FEAR which is silly. It is okay to be afraid, we just need to use that fear. Sometimes it can be motivating. My mentor said that in basic training for bayonets he learned there are two kinds of people: the quick and the dead.

SA: So why DO people value failure so much?

BM: Because it makes us feel better when we are in it that there is redeeming value — it give us the warm fuzzies.

But I actually think that thinking we can always learn keeps us stuck in it. We need to just grieve, curse and move on. I like to wallow in it — that feels good. I like to feel sorry for myself for a day and then it’s over.

SA: What about that feeling of impending failure? When things look to the outward world like they’re going well — you have clients, cash flow, etc. — but YOU sense the impending doom, because the opportunity is outrunning your ability to execute. Drowning in your own success, as it were. Ever been there?

BM: Yup — I call it “Growing Yourself Broke.” It is actually a harder stage then starting a business. I think if we set patient goals we would be better off. Unfortunately society tells us to be bigger, better, faster, richer and better-looking all the time.

SA: Starting a business tends to be built on promises — we take the cash because we need it, and then commit to delivering the product or service. But a lot of entrepreneurs get themselves over-promised / overcommitted — without even realizing it.

BM: Ah, a very dangerous way to live but a very practical way to grow if you can deliver. This is my preferred method. They over-commit because they try to be everything to all people. Strive for minimal achievement — commit to doing a few things well. I do three keynotes in my speaking part of my biz – that’s it — but I do them well. And I have narrowed my consulting business. It’s hard to walk away from cash.

SA: The book is an obvious must-read for someone who’s recently experienced a business failure. Why should someone riding the wave of success read it? Or someone just starting out?

BM: For those riding the wave: because good times don’t last forever. Learn how to use the ego appropriately. Success does not lead to more success. For the starter, so they know business success is not linear — so they do not buy into those myths. If you only get your confidence from success, you will be SOL when you fail. You need to get resiliency and confidence from both success and failure!! I hate books like The Road to Success Is Paved with Failure (a real book, by the way) – nonsense!

SA: Why? What’s wrong with that message?

BM: Because it makes it seem like there is always something to learn from failure and there isn’t. It gives an excuse or reason for failure which sometimes there isn’t. It’s too RAH-RAH for me. And guess what? There are many more times where people do not come back from failure than where they do. There are only so many Rocky’s or J. K. Rowlings.

SA: I think one of the other most important points in the book is for you to define success on your own terms. What are some of the ways you can do that? And what do you do when the people around you — friends, family, investors, even employees — are trying to impose their idea of success on you?

BM: I think that you have to define ahead of time what success means to you. Money is important — it is how we keep score — but what else? If you have “bounce” — true business confidence — you can expand the definition. My definition of being happily successful has always been being able to support my family by doing something I enjoy, and doing something that makes a difference in people’s lives, which I am doing by writing and speaking.

SA: One last question… what’s with the rubber band ball on the cover?

BM: I’m glad you asked! I love the rubber band ball for a lot of reasons. I grew up making rubber band balls. They became somewhat of an obsession for me. I loved how you take a simple rubber band and make it into a cool toy ball that could bounce. The biggest one I ever made was about 6 inches in diameter. Recently I went on http://www.youtube.com/ and there are so many videos with rubber band balls doing a lot of things. I concept of the rubber band ball is that while there are not 10 steps to success, there are building blocks. In order to build true business confidence, you layer on these bands or foundations for yourself. Rubber bands are also very flexible and that is what you have to be in the business world to succeed.

SA: Thanks again for your time, and I wish you great success with the book.

By Scott Allen
http://www.about.com/

\\ tags: Entrepreneurs