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Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World Hardcover – Illustrated, April 24, 2018
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Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world.
This is not that story.
It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, maker of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.
Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached.
Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPortfolio
- Publication dateApril 24, 2018
- Dimensions6.23 x 1.02 x 9.27 inches
- ISBN-100735213321
- ISBN-13978-0735213326
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"You won't find a more honest, raw, and helpful look into the trenches of founding a tech startup than this book. Rand Fishkin shares the rare hard-won insight no one else dares tell you." -- Nir Eyal, author of HOOKED
"Most books on founders and entrepreneurship sell a Silicon Valley perspective. Yet the inclusive, egalitarian vision of tech that Rand shares is the one that will truly dent the world." -- Nilofer Merchant, author of THE POWER OF ONLYNESS
"Rand Fishkin is like the industry friend we all wish we had - funny, warm, and refreshingly honest about the rollercoaster ride that is founding your own company." -- Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook
"Rand Fishkin is the real deal. This book is an honest, generous and useful look at what actually happens when you build a company, including the downs as well as the ups... I wish I had read it thirty years ago." -- Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Truth Shall Set You Free (from a lot of $#*% storms)
You've got an interesting business, but we don't believe it will ever get past a few million dollars in revenue.
-Anonymous Investor I Pitched in 2009
In 2005, my coworker Matt and I were working in a run-down, shared office space above a noisy movie theater in Seattle when he walked in. A hairy, barrel-chested, fortysomething guy with gold chains, a mean grimace, and a stack of papers in a folder stared down at me.
He asked, "Are you Rand Fishkin?"
I was twenty-five years old, disoriented by his arrival, intimidated by his appearance and tone, and utterly panicked. I'm usually a terrible liar, so was taken aback by how quickly a response left my mouth:
"Sorry, I don't think he's here."
We exchanged a few more words, but I remember none of them. My heart was pounding. I hated lying, but I also had no idea what might happen if I identified myself. Matt just put on his headphones and pretended to be engrossed in whatever website he was working on. When the extra from The Sopranos left, I called Gillian, president of our three-person firm (who also happens to be my mom). I told her about the unexpected visitor. She guessed he was a debt collector, sent by one of the firms to whom a bank had sold our debt.
Oh, right. The debt. The $500,000 we owed, in my name, to finance our struggling consulting business.
Ten minutes after I returned to my apartment (actually, Geraldine's apartment-I was unable to pay my half of rent with my sometimes tiny, sometimes nonexistent paychecks, and couldn't pass a credit check, either), I heard a knock on the door. Assuming it was Geraldine carrying something she didn't want to put down to turn the key, I opened up without looking through the peephole.
It was the debt collector.
"Ha! Gotcha," he said.
I was mute.
"You're pretty good, kid. I totally bought that act today. . . ."
Scared senseless, I just stared at him.
He handed me the folder of papers I'd seen in his hands earlier and said, "Rand Fishkin, you've been served."
I couldn't even reach out to take them. He dropped them on the ground and walked away.
Oops, I Accidentally a Startup
In the summer of 2000, I was twenty-one with a year of college to go at the University of Washington in Seattle. I'm one of those lucky kids whose parents paid his tuition so he could "focus on his studies, not on work."
That is, until I got into a fight with my dad and he threatened to cut me off. I was too prideful and stubborn to back down, apologize, or reconcile, so, for the next two quarters, I had to pay my own way.
I worked part-time at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center, a giant arcade, gaming events center, and retail shop around the corner from campus. My $4.75/hour salary was supplemented by buying Pokmon cards with my employee discount and reselling them on eBay and Craigslist for a tidy profit. I designed and built a few websites on the side for some extra cash. And, thankfully, in the early 2000s, college tuition hadn't yet skyrocketed past the point of absurdity. A full quarter, including books, only cost around $3,000-a sum I scraped together while still managing to have enough to go out to the movies, buy the occasional used video game, and pay the rent on my small, shared apartment.
But two classes away from graduating, I threw in the towel. Part of it was the cost, part of it was the lack of value I perceived from school, but a lot of it was because of a failed romantic relationship (long distance + breakup = broken heart). I wish I could say entrepreneurship was the catalyst for dropping out, but the truth is the other way around. I wallowed in a little self-misery, watched a lot of X-Files reruns, and only then realized I needed something to do besides work retail. Web design was my path of least resistance.
In 1981, my mom, Gillian, started a marketing consultancy in Seattle, helping small businesses with their logos, Yellow Page ads, brochures, and other print and advertising materials. In the late 1990s, her clients started asking for websites, and she recruited me to learn FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and HTML so I could help out. I liked the work, and the extra money, and when I told my mom I wanted to work with her full-time and not go back to college, she obliged.
Over the summer of 2001, we dreamed big. Seattle's tech scene was booming in Microsoft's backyard. Startups like Amazon, Kozmo, and HomeGrocer dominated the local news. Everyone was switching from slow, dial-up modems to high-speed broadband. We thought we had an amazing opportunity to design sites for local businesses that needed a presence on the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Internet. When the dot-com crash hit, I barely noticed. Our clients still needed websites, and I didn't pay much attention to the falling prices, the late payments, or the commoditization of web design.
For the next three years, we struggled against increasing competition, pervasive doubt about the web's future, the challenges of getting our clients to pay their bills on time, and, worst of all, our own foolish beliefs about what would help our company grow. We were trying to sell our services in a crowded marketplace without a competitive differentiator. We wasted money on advertising that didn't bring in business. We leased high-priced office space, convinced that an impressive building would help us close deals. We hired contractors and employees who didn't work out. We rented booth space at events that didn't even pay for themselves. And, worst of all, we went into debt to do it.
When I started working with my mom, she had a small amount of debt on the business-less than $20,000 in total. But three years later, we'd amassed an additional $100,000 of debt, much of it from the aforementioned missteps. The great thing about a consulting business is supposed to be the low-capital requirements-smart operators often make their consultancies profitable from day one. We went the other direction, and in 2004, after we'd failed to secure yet another client project we thought could put us on the path to success, we defaulted.
It's hard today to imagine the pre-2008-financial-crisis world of personal debt, where banks would extend loans of $50-$100,000 to a college dropout with a tiny salary. At the time, credit card offers arrived almost weekly, promising $10,000 limits that would quickly rise to $15,000 or $20,000. Lending institutions were happy to offer us lines of credit and equipment loans despite our meager track record and nonexistent collateral. Promotional interest rates in the <2 percent range were available for the first two to three years of an account. Seduced by these offers and in desperate need of cash just to make payroll and rent for three people, we went whole hog, racking up a balance that eventually came back to bite us.
We took out loans and put them in my name because I had, at the time, nothing to lose. My mom had her and my dad's assets on the line. They owned not only their home in Seattle's suburbs but my grandmother's house in Connecticut as well, which could have also been on the chopping block as collateral. So it was my social security number and my signature on the loans-something that, at the time, didn't really scare me. Defaulting on these loans never really crossed my mind.
Two of the most memorable days in my early career came that fall, of 2004.
The first was on a Sunday. Gillian had told me and Matt, my friend and our programmer, that we'd no longer be able to afford the rent at our pricey high-rise office tower. Moving out was our only option. We found a tiny shared office space in a run-down part of Seattle above an old movie theater for only a few hundred dollars a month (versus the $2,000-plus we had been paying), but we'd need to break our lease. That meant the landlord could potentially hold our equipment-including our computers, desks, chairs, and furniture-as collateral. We had to get it out of the tower and over to the new space fast, without anyone from the building noticing. This part's straight out of a movie.
Matt and I recruited a pair of friends-Marshall and Todd, a couple with two sets of big arms, strong backs, and a spacious truck to whom we promised dinner-and quietly entered the building via the loading garage.
We were halfway through loading up when the tower's security guard arrived. Cue heart falling into stomach.
After a brief, tense discussion on either side of our locked office door, we had the guard make a phone call to Gillian. Somehow, she convinced him to let us finish moving some of the items, but we had to leave a good deal behind to make it seem that we weren't actually "moving out" but rather "moving some things around." With our pulses racing, we took Todd's half-full truck out of the loading dock and across Lake Washington to our new, tiny, bare-bones but safe-from-seizure office. We'd sacrificed a good dozen pieces of unwieldy office furniture and some cheap supplies but felt lucky just to make it out with our computers and essentials. The next week, the company my mom had run for twenty-three years officially closed, and we started a new business under a new name.
But though we'd moved and changed our name, we were far from starting fresh. A couple of months later, that gold-chained debt collector showed up, and I called my mom in a panic.
Even though the debt was being used for business purposes, the creditors would be coming after me personally because it was my signature and my social security number on the applications. Gillian told me she'd try to take care of it. That was the first day I truly understood that most of the money our company owed was actually money I owed personally.
It made sense. If Gillian had used her name and her credit to take out even more of those equipment loans and low-interest credit cards, she and my dad could be held liable for repayment, and she already had some debt of her own. They could lose their assets and be forced into bankruptcy. My grandmother could lose her house.
That evening, walking home from work, I started processing our nerve-racking situation and my role in creating it. I'd willfully chosen to ignore and not ask questions about the financial problems we were in, ostensibly so I could concentrate on my part of the work but, in honesty, because I didn't want to deal with it. My mom could handle it. That was her job, right? I was just the web design guy. . . . That's what I'd told myself. But slowly I came around to the idea that sticking my head in the sand about our debt in the hopes it would go away was an untenable path.
When You're in Debt to the Truth, the Interest Rate Sucks
Considering the onslaught of "final notice" letters, threatening phone calls, and the visit from gold-chains-and-chest-hair guy (let's go with "Rocco," as he already fit every other debt-collector stereotype), the logical move would have been to declare bankruptcy. Most of the debt was in my name, a little was in Gillian's, and, because we had defaulted on the bigger chunks in my name, the black marks I was racking up on my credit report were having a similar effect to a bankruptcy (as of this writing, my creditworthiness is still in the toilet). But we had another impediment.
During the four years we built up debt, we'd been lying.
We'd never told my dad, Scott (to whom my mom was, and remains, married), that we had any financial problems, any outstanding loans, or any debt collectors breathing down our necks. We both feared, rightly or wrongly, that if he found out, he'd divorce my mom and break up our family.
It sounds too dysfunctional to be real, but this lie of omission wasn't without precedent. Growing up, my parents lied to each other all the time-mostly about little stuff (or, at least, those are the only things I knew about). Dad would say, "Don't tell your mom we did this" or, "If anyone asks, tell them you are only seven years old/were promised a discount/were told by the staff it was okay." Mom would say, "If your father asks, tell him we used a coupon/had to because of your school/went here on behalf of a client."
These were mostly innocent lies, crafted in order to prevent an altercation and keep relationships smooth. As an adult, reflecting on these memories makes me realize how profoundly unhealthy the dynamic between my parents was, but as a child and teenager, it made reasonable sense. The goal was to limit anyone getting angry or feeling hurt or left out or ignored. We were lying to keep the peace and maintain the veneer of a happy family unit.
That debt, however, was a much bigger lie than anything I'd ever been part of. I remember Geraldine and I talking about it at the time and for years after. We wondered how my mom could stand to be around my dad, day after day, holding in this giant secret, rushing to get home before him so she could shred any potentially incriminating mail, pretending that the debt-collection calls were wrong numbers, keeping up the appearance that things were fine at work-even bringing home an occasional paycheck to make him think things were okay when we probably should have used that money to stave off the next bank that might sell our debt to collections.
Gillian, ostensibly to keep us from worrying and to help us focus on our tasks, kept some of the details and progress of our struggle against debt hidden from me at the time. It wasn't until years later that I learned how she managed to dodge some of the worst debt collectors by proactively calling the issuers of the debt (Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo), sharing the details of our situation, and offering a smaller sum than what was owed in exchange for the creditor writing off the debt rather than selling to collections. Because a collections agency would typically pay the debt holder 5-10 percent of the actual amount owed, then try to collect the full amount and profit from the delta, my mom's tactic was often successful.
Product details
- Publisher : Portfolio; Illustrated edition (April 24, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0735213321
- ISBN-13 : 978-0735213326
- Item Weight : 1.16 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.23 x 1.02 x 9.27 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #192,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #224 in Starting a Business (Books)
- #1,258 in Entrepreneurship (Books)
- #1,890 in Business Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Rand Fishkin is the founder of SparkToro and was previously cofounder of Moz and Inbound.org. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you feed him great pasta or great whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to rank #1 on Google.
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As a story alone this book is a very thoughtful, somewhat detailed review of how they got to where they are today, including the mistakes.
They started as a consulting company that benefited a great deal from free advice its founder gave on YouTube. They then became the first to develop a tool to show who linked to whom on the internet by building a web index 'to rival Google', despite experts telling them this couldn't be done with their resources.
However, I think the book rises well above this kind of company biography and offers us thoughtful takes on tactics and strategies to think about, anchored by experience. He looks back at decisions he might have made differently in retrospect, which offers a lot of experiential insight.
This is a somewhat unique business book primarily for its exceptionally transparent view of the life and history of a small-to-mid-sized software startup company, as well as noting some nuggets of wisdom along the way. While the company is specifically a B2B SASS company I think much of the content is food for thought for technical startups everywhere. Even if you disagree with some of his take-aways he does a great job of intelligently making each case.
The book is an easy read, with occasional humor ranging from cheesy to funny, it is well-written and well laid-out, something I particularly appreciate having just previously read a fairly dry thesis published in a subatomic font size with barely 2-3 paragraphs per page.
Some Points He Makes:
(1) TRANSPARENCY
He makes a case for 'relentless candor' with employees, customers, and investors, balanced with empathy. He gives a specific example of a time the risk of doing so was perceived to be just too great, so it is a balanced commentary. However, he makes a case for being transparent whenever you can, that the long-term benefits are often well worth it, and the costs of not doing so can be far greater than often recognized. Again, many will disagree with him and work in environments not suited to this, but he makes his case intelligently.
(2) PIVOTS
He notes that extreme pivots are not often successful, despite survivor-bias showing us a great stream of terrific pivot stories like:
- Glitch-to-Slack
- Tote-to-Pinterest
- Odeo-to-Twitter
- Confinity-to-Paypal
- Burbn-to-Instagram
- ThePoint-to-Groupon
He suggests to think really hard before making that big pivot, perhaps trying pivots IN EXECUTION first in some cases before pivoting entirely.
(3) TAKING ON INVESTOR MONEY
Here he takes head on the notion that it is often better to have a smaller portion of a big company than a larger portion of a smaller company, noting this is not always the case and gives an example to illustrate.
He talks about the strengths and weaknesses of different investor categories (VC, speciality VC's, angel, debt, equity crowdfunding, debt crowd funding, etc.) such as cost of money, control of execution, growth requirements, etc.
He notes that the median startup founder ends up with 11% of the company, though without attribution so I'm not sure how canonical the source is.
(4) LIQUIDITY OF OWNERSHIP
He reminds the reader that selling your share of a company might be surprisingly difficult, especially for a good price. You can wind-up shares-rich, cash-poor for an extended period. Which leads to..
(5) CONSIDER AN EARLY EXIT
He demonstrates why he wishes he took an offer to be bought out by Hubspot years ago, despite the company's growth since then. He notes that the stories we hear of rejecting sales to Google, Yahoo, etc., and in time realizing much greater wealth, are the outliers and suggests considering early buy-out offers very seriously. Moments where the right buyer comes along and the company and your stake is worth enough to make for a generous payout may be few and far between.
(6) PRODUCT FOCUS
Here he tells how the company spent so much energy growing new products (and why they did so) that his key product features became an 'also-ran' in three-quarters of the main features. The company comeback through acquiring back talent through an acquisition is also covered.
This serves as an example of an exception to the adage that you want to build and invest in a company, not a product. Here we see a case where this company would be far better off always making the priority keeping primary products competitive before moving on to build out the line.
From a marketing point-of-view he also says it gets MUCH more difficult to SELL a larger number of products (and why). Those who can't compete without a broad product line will disagree, however he makes his case for his business story well.
(7) CUSTOMER RESEARCH
He tells the story of, after a continued failure to do so, really getting his customers needs by visiting a company that is his target market and seeing how the work is actually done over an entire day. The suggestion is that sometimes there is no substitute to getting out there and watching the customer in action, or at least as close to that as possible.
He suggests getting to know customers in-person as people while they are doing their work or tasks related to your product, not just as personas and their resulting biases. This helps to better estimate feature priorities, for example. He gives an example of Facebook making a feature decision that really bit them for reasons they could have uncovered by talking to customers more than relying on data.
He gives several examples of alternative ways to reach out to customers to get this type of feedback, conferences, consulting, pro bono work, and teaching.
(8) MVP
He gives an example from his company's history to demonstrate that for some companies the negative effects on the brand by releasing a minimally viable product (MVP) may not be worth it.
However, he does like iterative DEVELOPMENT working with potential customers pre-release STARTING with an MVP to start getting meaningful feedback as soon as possible. He also notes that the benefits to a small startup company with no brand recognition to lose releasing an MVP may outweigh the negatives. He calls the period after an MVP release that it can continue to hurt the brand's reputation the 'MVP Hangover'.
(9) WHICH INVESTORS
He suggests only raising money from investors with 'models 100% aligned with your business'. Assuming you can be choosy, he feels it is definitely worth the extra effort. He notes that it is common for investors to become misaligned with you over time, for example, perceiving an 8-digit exit as a poor outcome whereby you might be ecstatic over the possibility.
He also suggests that you thank yourself for taking the time to choose founder-friendly, employee-friendly investors, for example in his case having a liquidity preference of 1x and a low option strike price.
(10) FLYWHEEL vs. GROWTH HACKS
He makes the case that short-term growth hacks, unlike the one he did that he writes about, are by far best applied IN THE SERVICE OF UNSTICKING A FLYWHEEL to get it going. On their own the value of growth hacks are often more than short-term otherwise and can often even have negative consequences. Some flywheel-unsticking examples, Yelp paying for references, Yelp giving badges out with links back to Yelp, etc.
(11) CONVERSION RATE SUGGESTIONS
Using a web site improvement project as an example, he talks about the benefits to taking the time to go out and collect objections from real people who would otherwise use the product. Pages 123-124 serve as an excellent real-world example blueprint for this process. They also found that the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer was much higher the longer they engaged with them online before purchasing the product, a reminder of the indirect value of quality content.
(12) HIRING FOR COMPANY FIT
He found that doing so leads to better retention, motivation, and team cohesion.
On the other hand, of 200+ employees the importance of 2-3 key engineers in the success of his company was absolutely critical, twice, and leads one to wonder, what if they didn't meet this qualification? Yet, in support of his position, I've seen poorly fitting employees with terrible communication skills nearly destroy teams.
(13) ADVANCEMENT FOR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
He suggests Individual Contributor promotional and hiring tracks giving similar recognition and influence, salary and stock, accountability/expectations, etc. from a Jr. Role all the way up to VPs, directors, even C-Level executives in some cases, etc. in order to keep talent without requiring promotion on the people manager track. He created roles like 'Product Architect', 'Subject Matter Expert', and so forth to keep top people. He includes the chart they made for this on page 214.
(14) WHAT MAKES GREAT TEAMS
On this subject he brings up the work of an MIT researcher and 3 studies at Google, Carnegie Mellon, and North Dakota State University, as well as his own experience. Way too much to unpack in a sentence or two here, but in a few pages he does a thoughtful job of stressing the human side of a great team and makes an effort to back it up with academic and operational research.
Some example traits of a good team:
- They feel the psychological safety to contradict,question, express criticism, etc.
- They build up tolerances to criticism, learn to accept the faults of others their idiosyncrasies.
- There is empathy between them, a group norm of emotional support, a mutual respect and trust.
.. and more ..
Well, there you go. There's a lot in this book, well beyond what I included here, however I hope it might give you a better idea of the type of content within. It is an easy read, well-written and edited.
Regards,
Neil
I'd consider myself a friend of the author's and have had both online and offline conversations about some of the topics in the book. But it's been harder for me to ask for professional advice in person, and frankly the book is so well-structured that I think I got more out of it in this format than I would have in a conversation.
Rand has always been a great writer, but has taken his writing to another level with the polish of this book. Yes there are his trademark cheesy jokes, but mostly it's filled with direct, digestible summaries of his thoughts on the economics of startups, growth lessons he and Moz learned, and how he helped build Moz's company culture into what it is today.
If I had a small criticism of the book, as a former Moz employee, I was hoping for a little more meat behind how decisions were made in the startup boardroom (as opposed to some of the planning sessions he gives short shrift to in the book), particularly in the context of the economics of the business. But I can see how that kind of inside baseball would have gotten cut in favor of appealing to a wider audience.
It more than delivers on its subtitle as a "Field Guide," and I wish I'd read it prior to starting my current company, as it might have steered me on a 30-degree angle to the path I'm on now. In that regard, if you're a founder or thinking about launching a startup, it would be more than worth the one-time $17.53 on Rand's advice. And I'll continue to refer to some of the tables he includes in the book indefinitely.
Why do people choose to become entrepreneurs (and thank God that they do)? A big contributor is survivorship bias. The press and popular literature writing up the success stories of the winners. The failures get very little press. Dreams about that cool billion draw people into start-ups. And the world is a better place for it.
This book is a raw account of an entrepreneur that built a very successful business. About the heartache and the pain, the self-doubt, the health problems, the financial pressure and the blood, sweat and tears that go with it. I doubt that it will put anyone off becoming an entrepreneur. But I do think reading it will arm entrepreneurs with grit, more realistic expectations, and a number of valuable strategic and tactical lessons.
Worth reading through to the end.
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2023
Top reviews from other countries
Where else have you found anyone sharing eye-opening financial details, battles with depression and self-doubt, managerial insights in ONE book?
This is a MUST read for anyone interested in how business, and startups in particular, function, prosper, grow, exit, disappear or muddle along.
On top of his incredible candor, the fact that Rand packages this all together with humility and humor is the icing on my favorite (book) cake of the year.
There's so many valuable lessons here, not just in how to run a business (or the failures/learnings to look out for). But the big takeaways for me were life lessons. I love how Rand openly shares the real stories behind hard decisions and failures, where you know his approach is always trying to do the right thing for people first.
The empathy shown comes across hugely in many situations in the book - where taking care of people is top of his agenda, ahead of growing his own business / keeping shareholders happy.
In an ideal world you'd achieve both... but Rand can be very proud of what he's stood for, often against what others more purely business-focused would likely advise against. With this attitude, you can't help but want him to win - and in the long-term I have no doubt he will.
Look forward the sequel on how to be a success by doing things the right way!