“Life is Difficult!”

Those were the first three words to one of the most important and inspirational books that I have ever read. The year was 1991 and the book was The Road Less Traveled by Dr. M. Scott Peck. The first two pages alone included enough wisdom to change my life. Dr. Peck begins his book by implying that nobody ever guaranteed us that our lives would be easy. He suggests that we make thousands of decisions each day and millions of decisions in our lifetime and concludes that human nature causes each of us to choose “the easy road over the difficult one every time we have to make a difficult decision.” Dr. Peck made the difficult decision of writing a book and ironically it took five years to become a best seller. He learned that “success, too, can be difficult.” You and I have already made one of the toughest decisions that we will ever have to make in our lifetimes and we definitely did not choose the “easy road.” We decided to start our own businesses.

A wise man once told me that there are only two reasons that a new business will fail. The first reason is that they don’t know how to bring money (customers) into their business. The second reason is that business owners don’t properly reinvest (spend) the money that they do bring in. That’s why I started America’s Best Companies. At its core, the purpose of ABC is to help you to bring more money into your business and to help you spend less money on your day-to-day operations. We also have a goal of providing you with the information and advice you need to better run your business. Our discount programs, free website, Internet directories, advertising products, website development services, and this magazine have all been developed for the sole purpose of helping you to succeed. As we continue to grow, we are constantly improving our current product line and creating entirely new programs to add more value to your membership.

Can you break a pencil in half? I’m sure you can. What if I bundled 20 pencils together? The strongest man in the world couldn’t break them. Now imagine 100,000 pencils all tied together: a titan missile couldn’t break all of them. That’s my goal—100,000 members of ABC. That will give us the power to negotiate even better discount programs, and small businesses will get the national exposure they deserve. You can make that happen and help your business at the same time. I don’t want to sound like an infomercial, but action is the key to right thinking, and I have to ask you to take action. If you were to refer just 3 business owners to America’s Best Companies this month and, in turn, ask them to refer 3 owners next month, we would reach our goal. That’s it! We would then have the power of the largest associations in America in just 2 months. Again, this will require you to take “the road less traveled,” but isn’t the American Dream worth it?

Is your business part of the American Dream or is the American Dream to have a Mega-mart, a Mega-depot, a Mega-grocery, a Mega-repair, and a Mega-burger in every town in 20 years? Together, we can send people back to local businesses and stop filling the pockets of the Mega-rich CEOs and stockholders. I never needed 48 rolls of paper towels and 12 bottles of mustard anyway. Talk about traveling the wrong road! The road we all need to travel is to you…

America's Best Companies!