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    Course Corrections: Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters
    Course Corrections: Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters
    Course Corrections: Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters
    Ebook72 pages56 minutes

    Course Corrections: Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters

    By Mike Wells

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This book consists of 12 articles I wrote during the throes of building my business, Arnet Corporation, during the personal computer revolution of the 1980s. After several "near death" brushes with bankruptcy, the company took off, won numerous awards, and made the INC. 500 two years in a row.

    If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, or you're thinking of starting your own company, you will find these articles invaluable. They cover various problems I faced as an entrepreneur trying to grow a business as fast as possible, everything from finding a USP (Unique Selling Proposition), to inspiring and leading employees, to trusting your intuition and being able to "let go" and delegate to others.

    The articles are written in a personal, entertaining style. They have been used often as cases studies in the undergraduate and MBA level entrepreneurship classes that I have been teaching the last 20 years. Business students love them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Wells
    Release dateApr 21, 2011
    Course Corrections: Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters
    Author

    Mike Wells

    Mike Wells is an author of both walking and cycling guides. He has been walking long-distance footpaths for 25 years, after a holiday in New Zealand gave him the long-distance walking bug. Within a few years, he had walked the major British trails, enjoying their range of terrain from straightforward downland tracks through to upland paths and challenging mountain routes. He then ventured into France, walking sections of the Grande Randonnee network (including the GR5 through the Alps from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean), and Italy to explore the Dolomites Alta Via routes. Further afield, he has walked in Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway and Patagonia. Mike has also been a keen cyclist for over 20 years. After completing various UK Sustrans routes, such as Lon Las Cymru in Wales and the C2C route across northern England, he then moved on to cycling long-distance routes in continental Europe and beyond. These include cycling both the Camino and Ruta de la Plata to Santiago de la Compostela, a traverse of Cuba from end to end, a circumnavigation of Iceland and a trip across Lapland to the North Cape. He has written a series of cycling guides for Cicerone following the great rivers of Europe.

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      Book preview

      Course Corrections - Mike Wells

      Course Corrections:

      Navigating the Entrepreneurial Waters

      by

      Mike Wells

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Mike Wells 2011

      http://www.mikewellsbooks.com

      DEDICATION

      This book is dedicated to all the employees at Arnet Corporation.

      Also, a special thanks to Bob McKeown, who expertly edited all these articles as they were written.

      FORWARD TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION

      The 12 articles you are about to read were written during the period from 1985 to 1989, in the throes of the personal computer revolution, and in the throes of the heady rise of Arnet Corporation. They were published, one by one, in the Arnet Multiuser PC News, a newsletter that went out to 50,000 of our customers and strategic partners. Eventually the articles were published in a booklet and given out free of charge as a PR tool for the company.

      I received lots of positive feedback on these articles as they were being published, with readers telling me that they enjoyed the stories and that they applied some of the principles I discussed to their own businesses. I always wanted to publish these pieces in some form so that lots of other people could read them, but even collectively, they are too short for a printed book.

      However, with the advent of ebooks, length is no longer an issue. And so here you have Course Corrections in electronic format.

      Now, unless you worked in the computer industries in the 1980’s, you probably haven’t heard of Arnet Corporation.

      Initially, Arnet was a two-man engineering design firm, started by my stepfather, Jack Hancock, and me, when I was only 27 years old. I had only worked three years in the corporate world before I became fed up and decided to venture out on my own. Jack was 61 and was being encouraged to retired from DuPont, the chemical company where he had worked his whole life as an engineer.

      When Jack and I started Arnet, neither one of us knew much about business. We had to learn as we went along. I had a vision of becoming a millionaire from our business activity, somehow, but no clear idea about how to make that happen. It did happen, ultimately, but only after lots of struggle, after changing directions many times. I called these changes course corrections.

      After nearly going bankrupt a couple of times, we finally developed a standard product that could be sold to thousands of customers. That’s when everything finally came together. Arnet went on to be named the Nashville Small Business of the Year, won the U.S. Department of Commerce Exporter of the Year award, and was listed on the INC. 500 fastest growing private companies in America two years in a row. The development of Arnet Rock Solid Lifetime Warranty, which is also discussed in this book, was a major reason our PC adapter boards were rated Number 1 in product comparisons by Infoworld magazine, and others. Eight years after we started Arnet, when it was at its apex, we sold it to our largest competitor, Digi International. We felt the timing was right and Jack and I both wanted to pursue other things.

      I believe all of the business principles discussed in these articles are just as applicable now as they were the day I struggled to put them down on paper.

      I hope you enjoy them!

      Mike Wells

      Oxford, UK

      April 22, 2011

      INTRODUCTION

      (From the original Course Corrections printed booklet)

      When I started my own business with my stepfather, Jack Arnet Hancock, I was 27 years old—and cocky.

      I’ll never forget when one of Jack’s friends—a successful, retired entrepreneur—stopped by to lend his advice.

      You’ll make a lot of mistakes, he said, glancing around our cramped offices. And you’ll be in business two years before you earn a dime.

      I remember thinking. It may have taken you two years to turn a profit, Pops, but I’m different. Enchanted with the success stories of Apple and Lotus, I thought that if you were good enough, you could simply avoid making any mistakes.

      Well, I eventually proved the old timer wrong. It didn’t take us two years to make a profit—it took three.

      And we made more than our share of mistakes. We spent thousands of dollars developing products that were never sold. We geared up for one huge contract, lost it, and had to lay off half our company. At one point, our bankers declared us insolvent, and at another, the IRS nearly shut us down because we couldn’t pay our taxes.

      But somehow, we made it. And as we sailed our stormy course, navigating the treacherous entrepreneurial

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