Words to the Wise
Glean pearls of wisdom from this entrepreneur's experience.
Dale Bathum, 38-year-old founder of Bite Golf, a golf shoe
manufacturer and retailer in Preston, Washington, knows a thing or
two about running a successful business. A 2000
Entrepreneur young millionaire, he expects year-end
sales to hit $8 million. Here, he reflects on his smartest start-up
move--and biggest blunder:
What was your biggest start-up
success?
Bathum: I put a lot of
effort into [building] a strong team early on. That's what
carried us through--if it was just me and I didn't have a
strong team, I don't think we would have survived. So [I would
recommend] putting together a really strong team [internally] and
[externally] of accountants and lawyers and a board of
advisors.
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What was your biggest start-up
failure?
Bathum: Not having enough
upfront funding at the beginning, so we needed to go out and raise
money when the business was just getting underway. The second
[biggest mistake] was inventory mismanagement. We buy and sell
shoes--we overproduced some shoes that didn't sell [very well].
So we had to discount them, and that really killed our profits.
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