One $2,500 Macintosh. One $4,000 scanner. And a $60,000 check handed to me in a church in Georgia for a 500-page catalog I had no idea how to produce.
Inside, the sentence was: I have no idea if I can pull this off. Outside, the sentence was: Absolutely. Entrepreneurial rule number seventeen. Say yes. Then learn fast.
CatTrax cut Harbor Freight’s art department from forty people to twelve and paid their investment back in under a year. Eighty percent of my own people moved to California with us. We worked in New York. The catalogs got made.
Then the part I do not decorate. A bookkeeper left a year of wage taxes unpaid. The bill was $250,000. From that day my CPA reviewed every quarter. Never hand off your taxes, your payroll, or your financial reporting. Good times hide that kind of weakness. A crisis sends the invoice.
This chapter is part of Failure Is Always an Option. The full book is still a free PDF, and the voice-over still plays on the book page: the book page