Paul Hawken demonstrates that the answers to small business problems today cannot be solved by college degrees, training or money—but only by you. Nearly everyone harbors a secret dream of starting or owning a business. In fact, a million businesses start in the United States every year. Many of them fail, but enough succeed so that small businesses are now adding millions of jobs to the economy at the same time that the Fortune 500 companies are actually losing jobs. Paul Hawken—entrepreneur and bestselling author—wrote Growing a Business for those who set out to make their dream a reality. He knows what he's talking about; he is his own best example of success. In the early 1970s, while he was still in his twenties, he founded Erewhon, the largest distributor of natural foods. More recently, he founded and still runs Smith & Hawken, the premier mail-order garden tool company. And he wrote a critically acclaimed book called The Next Economy about the future of the economy. Using examples like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream, and University National Bank of Palo Alto, California, Hawken shows that the successful business is an expression of an individual person. The most successful business, your idea for a business, will grow from something that is deep within you, something that can't be stolen by anyone because it is so uniquely yours that anyone else who tried to execute your idea would fail. He dispels the myth of the risk-taking entrepreneur. The purpose of business, he points out, is not to take risks but rather to get something done. Kirkus Reviews A standout in an overcrowded field. Entrepreneur ...a wonderful combination of hardheaded business acumen, plain common sense, humor, and warmth. San Francisco Chronicle Growing a Business is highly readable....Its ideas on doing business deserve widespread circulation, discussion and recognition. Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author. His books include Growing a Business , The Magic of Findhorn , The Next Economy , and Seven Tomorrows , coauthored with James Ogilvy and Peter Schwartz. CHAPTER 1 Something You Live to Do When I started my first company in Boston twenty years ago, I had little interest in business. I was just trying to restore my health. Hindered by asthma since I was six weeks old, I had begun experimenting with my diet and discovered a disquieting correlation. When I stopped eating the normal American diet of sugar, fats, alcohol, chemicals, and additives, I felt better. I could breathe freely. When I tried to sneak in a hamburger and a Coke, my body rebelled. After a year of going from one diet to the other, I was left with a most depressing conclusion: if I wanted to be healthy, I'd have to become a food nut. I bid a fond farewell to my junk foods but then discovered that a steady diet of natural food was impossible to obtain without spending ten hours a week shopping at ethnic food stores, farm stands, Seventh-Day Adventist flour mills, Japan Town, and other distant vendors. The health food stores certainly weren't very helpful. For the most part, their idea of food included high-priced nostrums and vitamin formulas -- sold by women who wore nurses' uniforms and white hosiery that made their legs look slightly cadaverous. Tired of spending so much time shopping, I started the first natural foods store in Boston, and one of the first in the country. In the first year of operation on Newbury Street, it grossed about $300 a day and I had fun doing it. The smallness of the operation allowed me to feel close to customers and suppliers. When the business began to grow and I had to spend more time behind a desk than behind a counter, I enjoyed it less. As the years rolled by, the company made money, lost it, hired hundreds of employees, bought railroad cars, opened stores and warehouses on both coasts, set up wholesale and manufacturing facilities, flirted with bankruptcy, and engendered a host of lean and hungry-looking competitors -- some of them friends and former associates. Along the way I managed to commit most of the original sins of commerce. I overborrowed, understaffed, undermanaged, overstaffed, and overstocked. I managed to alienate most of my staff at one time or another, failed to delegate efficiently, and didn't know how to read the balance sheet. (I can read a balance sheet now, but I'm still capable of making these other mistakes.) When I sold the business after seven years, Erewhon Trading Co. was grossing $25,000 a day. That was in 1973. I departed the country and took up the pen -- something I had always wanted to do -- in order to write a book about a community in Scotland. When I returned to the States a couple of years later, with an Australian wife I had met in Scotland, I discovered another reason to go into business for myself: I was unemployable. I had not held a salaried job in my adult life, had no college degree, and my experience in running a compan