At BarCamp Nashville 2008, one of the speakers stated that the average entrepreneur has 3.8 failures before building a successful company. My first entrepreneurial business failed. This experience provided me with the passion to help other entrepreneurs successfully grow their companies and to avoid the mistakes I made during my first small business venture. My business failed for two primary reasons. First, the principal markets we served suffered a major downturn. We provided outsourced logistics for importers of raw commodities, such as steel and lumber. In 1995, the bottom dropped out of these industries and our sales dropped dramatically. Secondly, I made bad decisions based on my inexperience that significantly increased the debt the company.