David Glick

My name is David Glick - I was born in New Jersey in 1960. I'm married to a beautiful woman and have 4 amazing children and 10 (currently) grandchildren. And I will say that family is the most important thing to me in my life. And it should be in yours. But that's not what this is about.

I also am a nearly 4 decade entrepreneur (as of 2020) after becoming a pizza business owner in 1982. And this is not going to be a normal bio so I hope you don't mind. Because I am focused on business here, instead of a normal bio I'm going to answer a question that might go through your mind as a business owner:

What really is business success?

Let me start out by saying that I've owned many businesses over the years. I owned a pizza business for 23 years, a computer repair business for 20 years, a TV repair business for a year, an Italian restaurant for 6 months, a wedding video business for 3 months, and for the last few years a web design and digital marketing agency.

Over the years I've formed a vision of what I see for business success and here it is: true business success in the purest form means that the business is providing its products and/or services to the people that purchase from the business, and those people are pleased with their purchase and any services associated with it, and therefore would or do recommend the business to others.

Business is a process. It's not just about selling a product. It's about the process the customer/client/patient needs to go through to make that purchase, how the service is before, during, and after the sale, how easy or difficult it is or was to get any of those things, and what the impression was that your business, products, and services left on those people that spent their money for your goods and services.

The success that I'm talking about has to do with all of the things I just mentioned. It's not just whether the product works or how well it works. Consider the last time that you bought a product that you really liked, but had the worst time getting answers from the company or the purchase process was ridiculously difficult. Would you consider that purchase a complete success?

During the 2008-2010 recession I went to work for a large cable company (while I started another business on the side, of course!). During the orientation we were told by the Big Whigs they were thrilled because they just discovered they had an 85% customer happiness rate. I raised my hand and said that was wonderful, but if they were a small business they'd be out of business in a year. And it's true.. You've got to do much better than that to succeed. You won't ever please everyone, so don't ever worry that you can't.

Here's another point: does this mean a success in business necessarily makes a profit? There are businesses that are not a success from that standpoint but still make money, and there are businesses that are a success in taking care of their customers but don't make money. It almost sounds ridiculous, but it's true. We don't live in a perfect world, after all.

My dad was a CPA and he helped me purchase the pizza business in 1982 by taking out a second mortgage on his house. We both knew it would be a struggle - it was purchased during a recession, the business had a bad reputation in town, it was using artificial cheese for the pizza (YUCK, right?) and was being run by a couple of teenage kids that really didn't care about much other than their paycheck.

Over the course of time I changed nearly everything but the phone number (it was a GREAT phone number 634-5000!) and the dough recipe, which was absolutely amazing. It took nearly 2 years after the business purchase before it started making any kind of profit. That was with only me working the place some of those months with no employees, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Right.

After nearly 2 years and gross sales increased due to major changes I made based on a hunch, I hired employees again. After 2.5 years I was able to take a vacation and buy a new car (on payments of course). My dad told me at that point that my business was a success, and was very proud of me (I was only 23 at the time). However, in order for a business to be successful on a long-term basis, it really needs to succeed first at taking care of its customers - right?

Being successful from my business owner financial viewpoint means you can earn a living from the business. A business can be successful some years and not others. Not being successful is not being a failure.

A business failure only occurs when one of two things occurs: 1) You as the business owner stops trying to become successful and closes the doors (in the real world or virtually), or, 2) the business owner is forced to close the doors because they can't afford to pay for a product or service that's essential for the business to operate. One good example of that is rent on a building space.

Does a business failure make you a failure though? Of course not!!

I've coached many soccer teams over the course of 20+ years, beginning when my oldest child was just 5 years old. I coached my kid's teams, and after my kids aged out I continued to coach because I learned so much about the sport and enjoyed coaching immensely. I coached kids from 4 years old to 18 years old both for AYSO and our local high school.

Here's one of the most important things I learned about life through coaching soccer - we learn MORE about what we're doing from a failure than we do from success. We always learned more about how to improve ourselves from games that we lost than from games that we won.

So just because the thing you tried today didn't work, or the business isn't making money or things are just not going well, does NOT mean YOU are a failure. Figure out how to learn everything you can from those experiences and determine different ways to do it. You don't know what you don't know until you know it.

One of the best resources for new information is from other more experienced people. Our world today is full of information - we just need the RIGHT information! Here's a tip - join some groups on Facebook that are in the same or similar business as you are.

Listen to other group member's challenges, how they are or have overcome them, and learn from them! You should also contribute to those conversations - you may not know what they know, but surely you know other things they don't that can help them too!

One last thing - read my book. If you think you got great information in this bio, you haven't seen anything yet. I promise that you'll be amazed at what I've learned over these nearly 40 years, and that what I say will absolutely help you become more successful faster than you could without reading it. Get it today!