Excerpt: "Sweat Equity"
"I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better." That makes me laugh whenever I hear it. The struggling years are not something anyone wants to do, but for most people to become successful or to learn to be an expert, there is struggle involved. That's the part of your story when you work for nothing, when you put out more than you take in, and when you wonder why you're doing it in the first place.
The Taylor Guitars story progresses along a path through many seasons, as does any successful company. Companies are conceived, born, nurtured and grown. Some companies live for generations and some don't, but nearly all have a meager beginning. Ours certainly did, and our beginning seemed to last for years. It's difficult for me to espouse expert business advice based on our early years since they piled up with very little progress.
Nobody knew who we were, and we were only one step away from going out of business every day. We weren't brilliant kids, but we were smart enough, and we didn't quit. We got smarter as time went on and as we gained experience. There were years of wrestling with the same things day in and day out. We'd make progress on many fronts, but it wasn't until progress was made on all fronts that the bottom line began to change. All fronts include things like time.
Recently, we introduced solid body electric guitars into the market. Talking to a dealer we asked, "In your opinion, what does this guitar need in order to be a successful player in the market?" He pondered for a moment and simply answered, "Time."
There wasn't anything we could do about the time factor back then, and we didn't accept that anyway as being something that needed to happen. We were wrong, of course, but it's a moot point because we had to stay in business in order for the time to pass that would allow people to know who we were. So we worked—what else could we do?
The way I look at it is kind of like we were going to school. I knew people who were 19 when they started college, and spent four years only to go to graduate school for another couple years or more. Then they got a job at a company and had to learn the business before they were worth much to the employer. They might have worked at their first job for five years and then started over somewhere else, but all the while becoming a little more able to contribute. Ten or 12 years might pass before they'd feel they were finally getting somewhere. Why should it be different for us?
Formal education and work experience are part of a normal approach to becoming a useful addition to the workforce; mine was just different. I was working for myself, which I have observed to be the greatest source of working energy I've ever witnessed. I've seen people leave their job at the day's end who are totally beat after eight hours. I've seen those same people start their own business and work 15-hour days on the energy of owning something themselves. I'm watching my daughters, Natalie and Minet, along with their partner Michael, do it now. I am pretty sure that much of my early story was fueled by energy that came from working for myself, along with my unfettered passion for making guitars, tools, and machines. It also didn't hurt that our customers, those whom we did find every once in a while, loved their guitars. Letters of praise would arrive in the mail, and I have to tell you, that alone can keep a guy going emotionally.
We started early in life and worked hard. I've heard it said, "Pay now and play later, or play now and pay later, but sooner or later you're going to pay." I paid early and I'm glad I did. I don't count what we did early in our business as something made of genius, but more a story of a goal and the work it took to get there. It was fueled by passion and commitment. It wasn't the kind of commitment where we said we were just trying this out to see how it would go, but rather the type of commitment that wasn't discussed, because we'd already decided, and it was normal in our minds to continue. We had decided we were going to build a guitar company and that's what we woke up and did each day.
It's not very sexy at this point, but to me it's the best part of the story because it's something that nearly everyone can do. Everyone can work hard. There's something innately respectable, no matter who you are, about persevering. It doesn't matter what group of people you happen to be with. If you say you've been married 35 years, you get approval. If you say you've had one job for 25 years, you get admiration. You don't get the same admiration, even if you strike gold, if there's not the sweat equity behind it. People roll their eyes at other people who've had things given to them, unless those people take that gift and work hard to multiply it. If you work, people admire the effort. I didn't do it for the admiration, I'm just pointing out that working through the hard part of any pursuit is not something anyone of us want to do, because it's hard, discouraging, and takes a long time with no immediate reward, but it's something that everyone respects and admires.