Which small businesses fail or succeed most often?
I'm not sure that you can say “All of these fail, and all of these succeed,” because there's so much involved in these things. Some of these things, as I just mentioned, depend so much on what you do with the product. I think that you can look at whether there's a demand for this type of business or not, or the uses of the product. For example, I think maybe Joe, if your name is Joe it helps out a lot. There's a man called Joe Sugarman. He's the most known because he used to sell blue blocker sunglasses on television. He sold those for about 10 years, but he sold a lot of other products. He was the first one to sell handheld calculators, and he sold them through the mail. This is another example of a product which had a terrible time getting off the line. He sold them even before Sears did, and when he sold this thing, he sold by direct mail at first, and it failed, it failed miserably, but he kept track. That's another thing that's a good lesson for all of us; in other words, just keep track of what you're doing as well as the results and where they came from. Joe had different mailing lists that he used, and he found out that even though they lost all the money, I mean they lost the money basically, certain lists really worked. The list of engineers is an obvious one that worked, and other lists didn't, so he went back to the people who brought him the money, and he said, “Look, yes, we lost all the money, but I know what's wrong,” and he showed them the things. They reinvested and it was very successful. I'm not sure you can say that certain products are always not good and these other products always are good.
