Sometime during the next 12 months…

At some point in the next 12 months your bank manager will ask you to sign some paper. What you do right then will define your future.

Please don’t sign until you grasp exactly what those papers mean. (They don’t mean what the bank manager says, which is why he won’t let you change his paperwork.)

Twenty years (May 1992) ago my first firm closed.

I spent the following years talking to the owners of hundreds of other firms. I wanted to know what they had done to “stay alive”. I just knew I must have missed some piece of crucial info. I was stunned that nobody was doing anything more than I had.

After asking so many questions I became the de facto expert on the subject. (A person asking so many questions must, after all, have some answers.) I started presenting hundreds of seminars teaching thousands of entrepreneurs survival skills. For themselves and not their firms.

And then in 2005 I got distracted by the web. This web stuff is so engrossing. I am sorry.

I am most sorry because SA has lost more than 500,000 small heroes over the past decade, and I feel I should have helped each family survive the paper they had signed. And to make sense of all the advice each was given, which may have been good for the business, but was toxic to their own future.

This morning I am re-launching that CrashProof your Business material online. That original three-hour seminar is now ready for download hereas a series of three one-hour videos.

May I please ask for your help in helping those folk that need this guidance now?

If you have already heard me present these ideas and tactics (or read them in SA’s best selling book on the subject) I would value you writing a short comment or story at the bottom of this page about how they worked for you (or did not). These were radical ideas back then.

They still are. They still work as well as ever they did. And I am still the only person talking about them.

Scouring a bunch of forums this past week, in a world of economic turmoil, it is easy to see how many people are facing huge problems as their firms stumble. Nobody is offering useful answers. Most of the experts have a simple approach: “kak and betaal”, without any knowledge of how scared these folk are and the lifetime losses they face. I have been there. This knowledge can help, and your story will help me help them.

Not knowing how to fund my firm, and believing the words my banker said rather than the wordswritten on the pages I was signing, cost me more than 2 million rand back in 1992. (That is about R6 million in todays values.)
If you know of anyone starting up or facing challenges then please ask them to read this email. These skills will save their homes. Anybody already closing down can still use most of this material, but will have to work pretty darn fast.

At the end of 1992 I faced all of this alone, without a clue where to start. Nobody needs to do that ever again. They just don’t yet know it. They will appreciate your sending them this message. And so will I.