Hello business made simple professionals. Welcome to the podcast that takes the mystery

out of growing your business. This week we're answering the question, if one out of ten

startups fails, is your startup destined to fail? Special guest Tom Eisenman, professor

of business administration at Harvard Business School, an author of How Startups Fail, shares

six distinct patterns he's found from surveying over 470 failed entrepreneurs, so you know

exactly what to avoid when starting up and growing your own business. But first, let's

check in with your host, Donald Miller and co-hosts, Koola Callahan and Dr. J.J. Peterson.

On this week's episode, we're talking to Tom Eisenman about why startups fail, that's

the title of his book. J.J. Tom, you know, we've already done the interview, you haven't

heard it yet, but Tom basically goes through a list of six reasons startups fail. And it

actually acts as a vaccine in some ways, because it makes you more self-aware. Here's

a question for you, we've been in business, you know, story brand business needs to have

a six, seven years. I have a question for you, you and I are both going to have to answer

this question. Two ways, we could have bid it. And we got really lucky. You know what I mean?

There's no reason we should be allowed, right? There were definitely moments where we made

specific choices to head a very specific direction. So like, for instance, at one point when

we decided to do our certification program versus like building out a huge business, we

decided to keep our... Right, we were going to bring coaches in-house and we decided to

certify them because it gave us the chance to scale fast. And that could have, that was

a choice we made. It was a little bit... In other words, if we would have decided to have

the coaches in-house, we could have... We could have bid it. We could have totally bid it.

We could have gone, our overhead would have gone through the roof. We didn't know if

...