Page 47 - GS170202

Feature

As a way of also giving back, I became the author of Street
Smarts , the twice-monthly column that shares insights
SM
and receives feedback from the payments community. It
was a great experience.
Your first book, Size Doesn't Matter: Why Small
Business is Big Business, became a bestseller.
What inspired you to become an author?

I am not a writer by background. My daughter attends the
University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. She's in the
undergraduate business program. When she was applying
a few years ago, she needed help with her essays. When she
said she needed help with the writing, I started putting my
thoughts down and discovered there was a book here.

A lot of my friends have asked me how I went from being
in big corporate America to being a small-business owner.
That became the topic of my first book, which I wrote in
about a year. I didn't write every day. I wrote for maybe an
hour a week. Then the concept got picked up by a publisher
based in California's Silicon Valley.

When the book came out, I was fortunate. It hit No. 1 and
became a bestseller in the entrepreneur and business
management category on Amazon. The book did well,
and then I started getting a little bit of a following. People
started calling and emailing me and sharing their thoughts.
I have written four other books since then about business.

I have three children. My middle child is a junior in high
school, and we wrote a book called Mom and Dad – I Promise
I'll Get into College. It's 140 thoughts, 70 by me and 70 by my
daughter, about the college experience. That book hit No. 2
on the Amazon charts and is a best seller. I was happy for
my daughter. She's smart, and it was a good experience for
her.

Through the books, I have become a contributing writer to
Entrepreneur magazine. I write for them on a monthly basis.
I also write for a magazine called the The Business Journals,
which has 60 magazine affiliations. It's funny how things
happen. You do something just for the fun of it, and things
open up.

My friend Jack Daly is 68 years old and lives in San Diego.
I consider him to be the best sales trainer in the world right
now. He is like the Tony Robbins of salespeople. He and I
wrote a book together that is coming out in a month, and
we have launched a sales training program that is actually
one of my businesses right now. It's a membership program.
The website is JackDalyTraining.com, and we have taken all
his content – the books, the articles – and are introducing it
to salespeople all over the world.

47