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In 2013, St. Louis, Missouri-based sisters Jane Molina and Joy Williams were in a busy season of life, running their family’s long-time heating and cooling business and raising five young children between them. 

Despite having no shortage of to-dos on her list, as Molina breastfed her third son, a new project took shape. She noticed that sometimes he would latch not for milk, but for comfort, and searched for a pacifier that could fulfill that need and give her back some time.

But she couldn’t find a product that mimicked real breast tissue and encouraged a wide latch, rather than the typical tight, pursed one. What if she created it herself? 

Molina voiced her idea to Williams, whose marketing background would be a serious asset. At first,  Williams questioned the practicality of starting another business. The family HVAC company continued to struggle in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; it was tough to cover all of the bills. 

“ We basically were walking around with holes in our shoes, eating bologna sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola, paying payroll and then having $150 in our bank account at the end of a week,” Williams says. 

Starting a new business to soothe babies: Ninni Co.

However, Molina felt called to bring the ultra-soft silicone pacifier to life, and before long, Williams was on board. Their pacifier brand Ninni Co., named to honor their grandmother, who breastfed 10 children and referred to the act as “the ninni,” was born. 

But it would be a long road before the product hit the market. 

For about seven years, the sisters worked on Ninni Co. on the side, drawing on financial support from family, including their mother. They tapped into their retirement funds and personal savings to develop a prototype, which cost less than $1,000, and work with an attorney to secure a patent.

Selling the HVAC business to fund Ninni Co.

By 2019, Molina and Williams were ready to go all-in; they decided to sell the HVAC company and open up additional funds for Ninni Co. 

The sisters sold the business for $500,000, to be paid in three installments, and owed $120,000 to vendors. “ People hear, ‘Oh, you sold a business and used that money,’ but it’s not all glitz and glamour or some exorbitant amount,” Williams notes. 

Next, the co-founders joined incubator programs, including BioSTL and the CET’s (Center for Emerging Technologies) flagship program for entrepreneurs, Square One, and received $10,000 through the Level Next program. They used the money for consumer testing the prototype and secured a manufacturer, the same one they use today, in upstate New York. 

Then the sisters were told it would cost $50,000 to $75,000 to create their product mold. The co-founders needed more cash. 

Meeting for coffee leads to a much-needed loan

Fortunately, a chance encounter at a networking event with a man who worked at Carrollton Bank helped them secure it. 

“I used to carry the prototype in a little box, something I got from Marshalls or Ross,” Molina says. She presented that box to the man over coffee, and he immediately understood the product — because his wife was currently breastfeeding. 

He agreed to structure a loan, and the journey to market continued.

Pre-launch, the sisters also received a $70,000 angel investment for a 20% stake in the company from two older men in their church. “ It was a large chunk that we unloaded right at the beginning,” Molina says, “but of course we were valued at zero. So where Joy and I were at, $70,000 might as well have been $250,000.”

Launching the product on Shopify in 2021

By March 2021, the sisters couldn’t wait to test the waters any longer; they launched with a modest supply. They went live on Shopify and priced the pacifiers at $12.99. They didn’t have professional photography, so they used stock images and spread the word on social media. 

On day one, they sold about 100 pacifiers, thanks to support from family and friends, but the number dwindled, sometimes to zero sales in a day. Molina and Williams fulfilled orders in their mother’s basement for about six months, with her help.  

Then, in April 2021, a viral TikTok video changed everything. 

A friend of Williams’ who happened to be an influencer loved using the product for her son, so she created an Instagram reel about it. Then Williams reposted the same video to TikTok.

Since the beginning, the sisters had turned on Shopify alerts on their phones, the “dings” tracking each sale in real time — and that night, they wouldn’t stop going off.

The next morning, the sisters realized Ninni Co. had gone viral, but they only had about 35 pacifiers in stock, with an additional 250 ready at the factory.

Williams put on her marketing hat and leaned into the demand, posting on Instagram and Facebook about upcoming drops and colors. The strategy lent the brand an exclusivity — and it paid off in a major way. 

Going viral brings a serious revenue boost

In 2023, Ninni Co. saw about $2.2 million in annual revenue. The following year, revenue hit $2.9 million, then $5.3 million in 2025, up 83% year over year.

In 2026, Ninni Co. is on track to reach $6.5 million in revenue. The brand sells more than 1,000 pacifiers every day.

Within four years, Molina and Williams bought back 95% of the company from their angel investors. Currently, the co-founders have eight employees and still manage the company’s fulfillment themselves. 

Learning a lesson through Amazon selling

What’s more, the sisters haven’t lost sight of Ninni Co.’s original mission.

As a U.S.-manufactured brand with sourcing focused in the U.S. and Sweden, profit margins are slimmer than on products made in some places overseas, and they’ve had to be selective with their distribution channels.

For example, Ninni Co. stopped selling on Amazon after four months because “it was one of the most stressful, hardest times of our company,” Molina says. 

The platform diverted substantial traffic from the company’s website, and Amazon held money from the sales for two to three weeks, then took up to 50% in the end. Additionally, Ninni Co. had invested in a team to manage the channel. 

“ It wasn’t right for our business model,” Williams adds. “Not every platform is made for every single business or product. Everyone is unique, and you have to honor that.”

Other advantages come with being the customer’s primary contact too, the co-founders note. 

Not only do the sisters get a firsthand look at valuable feedback, but they’ve also built strong communities on Instagram and Facebook  — and it’s part of why it’s been so easy to say “no” to the many people who have expressed an interest in buying them out over the years.

“We wanted to build this business as the two moms behind the dream,” Williams says. “We really feel like we’re living the American dream, and we love what we do every day.”

In 2013, St. Louis, Missouri-based sisters Jane Molina and Joy Williams were in a busy season of life, running their family’s long-time heating and cooling business and raising five young children between them. 

Despite having no shortage of to-dos on her list, as Molina breastfed her third son, a new project took shape. She noticed that sometimes he would latch not for milk, but for comfort, and searched for a pacifier that could fulfill that need and give her back some time.

But she couldn’t find a product that mimicked real breast tissue and encouraged a wide latch, rather than the typical tight, pursed one. What if she created it herself? 

Many entrepreneurs are drawn to exciting sectors such as AI, crypto or whatever is trending, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s glamour in telling people at a dinner party that you’re building the future.

The businesses I’d bet on, though, are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the boring, mundane industries that people tune out as soon as they come up. These are the markets where the most defensible, high-margin businesses get built, and most entrepreneurs walk right past them chasing something flashier.

I know this because I picked one of the least glamorous industries imaginable: insurance (specifically, jewelry insurance). Nobody dreams about working in this sector, but that’s exactly why it worked for me.

Boring usually means overlooked

A boring industry is typically overlooked and underserved. These are old, entrenched, legacy markets where customers might interact with the product once a year, if that. People are frustrated with the status quo, but they’ve accepted it because what’s the alternative? The technology is bad, and the service is worse, but everyone puts up with it because that’s how it’s always been.

This frustration is the opening. When customers are annoyed but resigned, you’ve found a market with an unsolved problem. Insurance is a perfect example because it’s complex and widely avoided. It’s also as far from glamorous as a business gets, and that’s precisely why so few entrepreneurs bother to look at it.

Established businesses get complacent

The reason why these industries stay boring is simple: Established players get comfortable. When no one pays attention to a market, the players in it stop innovating and lose sight of what a good product even looks like, relying on the fact that customers don’t have a better option. Complacency is a strong sign that a market is ready for someone new.

Before BriteCo, I witnessed this firsthand. I’m a third-generation jeweler and a Gemological Institute of America gemologist, so I spent years watching customers try to insure rings and watches they’d just bought. The application process was miserable, requiring customers to fax documents, then wait days or weeks for a coverage decision. Making a claim was a manual, over-the-phone process with no technology to handle it. NPS scores were dismal, and nobody in the industry seemed to care. This was the accepted standard because people had no real alternative.

Distribution is hard to replicate

We’ve now built much better software. Customers can get a quote and coverage in minutes instead of waiting weeks, and making a claim doesn’t require navigating frustrating phone menus. But fixing the software was the easy part.

Jewelry insurance has a timing problem. Customers often purchase jewelry and then don’t think about insuring it until months later, if ever. There are perhaps two moments when insurance even crosses their mind: standing at the jeweler’s counter with the purchase receipt in hand, sitting at home at 11 p.m., and finally typing “jewelry insurance” into Google.

At BriteCo, we addressed both moments. We sold to jewelers for years before offering direct options to consumers because store owners are unlikely to refer their best customers to a brand nobody has heard of. We then built the direct-to-customer side to be there when they finally decide to search for insurance on their own.

This is the advantage of a boring niche. A national carrier can’t justify investing in a business case this small, while established specialists have no reason to change when the current processes are simply accepted as they are. Find a problem, figure out when customers are most likely to care about it, and go solve it.

Profitability is often overlooked

I want to challenge a common assumption about building companies. Growth gets all the attention. Entrepreneurs talk endlessly about scaling but not enough about profitability, and that’s backward. The entire point of a business is to be profitable; if you’re not, you’re out of business.

Boring industries are often the most profitable. These niche, overlooked markets have customers with valid problems and real money at stake. Solving a mundane but important problem is far more valuable than building another AI demo with little practical use.

This is the model we run at BriteCo. We found an underserved niche market, built a better product, and now we dominate the sector and cross-sell to a growing base of policyholders. It’s profitable.

If you’re deciding where to build, resist the pull toward whatever’s trending. Instead, look at the industries people complain about but continue to tolerate because they’ve stopped expecting better. Find the market where the established players have lost momentum and processes still rely on paperwork and patience. If you modernize the technology and reach customers earlier than established businesses bother to, the boring, neglected industry becomes an area your competitors can’t replicate.

After you find success, go do it again for the next one.

Many entrepreneurs are drawn to exciting sectors such as AI, crypto or whatever is trending, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s glamour in telling people at a dinner party that you’re building the future.

The businesses I’d bet on, though, are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the boring, mundane industries that people tune out as soon as they come up. These are the markets where the most defensible, high-margin businesses get built, and most entrepreneurs walk right past them chasing something flashier.

I know this because I picked one of the least glamorous industries imaginable: insurance (specifically, jewelry insurance). Nobody dreams about working in this sector, but that’s exactly why it worked for me.

Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

I’ve spent two decades watching executives use “we did the research” as a substitute for actually understanding their customers. Masino pointed to customer research when she rolled out the new look, and the backlash happened anyway. But the takeaway of “change bad, nostalgia good” misses the actual failure. The failure wasn’t the decision to evolve a stale brand, but mistaking data for understanding.

Those are not the same thing. I wrote an entire book on the difference, because I kept watching smart leaders get burned by it.

Customers will answer your question, but they won’t tell you the truth

In 1999, Sony ran a focus group for a yellow Sport Walkman. Participants loved it. “So sporty,” they said. Sony thanked them and let each person take a free unit home: black or yellow, their choice. Every single person took the black one.

That’s how people work. What someone says in a survey and what they do at the moment of truth are two different data sets, generated by two different parts of the brain. Neuroscience research on decision-making suggests roughly 80 to 90% of it runs on emotion, not logic. Ask a customer what they think of a new logo, and you’ll get a rational-sounding answer. But the reaction that actually drives their behavior — loyalty, defection, an angry post shared four thousand times — is running on something else entirely: identity, nostalgia, a sense that something theirs was taken without asking.

Cracker Barrel’s customers weren’t reacting to a font. They were reacting to a feeling that nobody bothered to ask them how they’d feel. That’s a translation failure, not a strategy failure. And it’s the same failure that’s sunk a hundred rebrands nobody remembers, because the companies were smaller and the backlash never made a headline. The mechanism is identical. Cracker Barrel just had the misfortune of doing it in public, at scale, with a political spotlight attached.

“We did customer research” is not a finding, it’s an alibi

Most customer research is built to produce certainty, not insight. You ask a clean question, you get a clean answer, you write a report, and you move forward feeling protected. If it goes wrong later, you can point back to the “data.” But clean answers to shallow questions don’t predict behavior — they just make leadership comfortable pulling the trigger.

The real work is qualitative, messy, and uncomfortable. It’s understanding not just what customers say but the emotional terrain underneath it, what they’re afraid of losing, what identity they’ve attached to your brand, what unstated expectation you’re about to violate. That kind of understanding doesn’t come from a survey question with five tidy response options. It comes from digging past the first answer to the second and third questions nobody thought to ask.

Most organizations stop at the first answer because the first answer is fast, quantifiable and defensible in a board meeting. The second and third questions are slower, harder to summarize in a slide, and occasionally tell leadership something it doesn’t want to hear. That’s exactly why they get skipped. And that’s exactly why the surprises keep happening.

Jo-Ellen Pozner, the Santa Clara management professor who’s been vocal about the Cracker Barrel case, is right that the environment matters. A shaky economy makes any brand’s core audience more protective, not less. But protective customers aren’t asking companies to freeze. They’re asking to be brought along. Those are opposite instructions, and only one of them requires you to actually understand your customer instead of just surveying them.

The lesson boards need, and the one they’re about to learn instead

Leaders need to take a hard look at whether “customer research” in your organization means real translation of customer psychology, or just a compliance step before a decision that’s already been made. But that’s not going to happen. Boards will instead flag every future rebrand, logo tweak, or product evolution as too risky and strategic drift will calcify for another year because nobody wants to be the next Cracker Barrel headline. But change was never the threat. A shallow understanding dressed up as due diligence was.

The irony is that freezing is its own decision, and it carries its own research failure. A board that won’t touch the brand because it’s afraid of the emotional terrain still hasn’t mapped that terrain. It’s just betting that nothing changes in the meantime. That’s not caution. That’s the same alibi, worn a different way.

So don’t ask your team, “Did customers like it?” Ask them what your customers were actually afraid of, and whether anyone bothered to find out before the launch. If nobody can answer that with more than a survey score, you don’t have customer research. You have an alibi for when things go south.

Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it. 

These employees note that someone chooses random words at the last minute for Moynihan to use in his prepared statements. For example, Moynihan has used “gainsay,” or labeling something as untrue or invalid, more than once. In one earnings call, he said adviser productivity was strong, along with accompanying or “concomitant” growth in fee-based assets. In another call, he said he didn’t “get fantods,” or wasn’t nervous. 

“There is no question, Brian loves a good challenge and always makes us think,” a Bank of America spokesperson told the Journal. “Or what might be called ludically noetic.” According to Merriam-Webster, “ludic” means playful while “noetic” means relating to or based on the intellect.

How he does it

Typically, Moynihan adds at least one advanced word per earnings call, although at times he includes multiple archaic words in one sentence. Bank of America staff members listening in on the calls try to pinpoint the word that Moynihan added, and sometimes it is easy to find.

For example, Moynihan added “perspicacious,” meaning “smart, sharp and quick to notice or understand things that are hidden,” to a sentence during an analyst call in 2022. “A perspicacious analyst might wonder whether talk of inflation, recession and other factors would fructify in a slower spending growth,” he said at the time.

Moynihan’s penchant for advanced vocabulary can sometimes lead to confusion. During a July call with analysts, Moynihan labeled the Iran war as “anfractuous,” which means winding, complex or tortuous. 

The unusual vocabulary created a transcription mess. FactSet recorded the word as “infructuous,” meaning unproductive, while Bloomberg’s transcription service captured it as “intractable,” or difficult to manage. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence transcribed the remark as: “the Iran war is in [fractures].”

One listener, Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo, labeled Moynihan’s vocabulary an “intellectual flex” and said he preferred to keep things simple. Mayo said Moynihan was the “anti-Jamie Dimon.” When the JPMorgan Chase CEO speaks, “everybody understands,” he added. 

Moynihan’s journey

According to the Journal, Moynihan studied history at Brown University, where he also co-captained the rugby team. He graduated in 1981, then got his JD from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1984. Members of his team describe him as intelligent, having a photographic memory and constantly working, per the Journal.  

He joined Bank of America in 2004 following the company’s merger with FleetBoston Financial and stepped into the top job in 2010.

Bank of America had a market capitalization of $443 billion at the time of writing. 

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it. 

I have used an LLC formation service myself. It organized an unfamiliar process, clarified the required steps and helped turn a business idea into a registered legal entity.

The service did what it was designed to do. It made formation easier.

But once the LLC existed, the difficult questions remained. How should limited capital be used? Which expenses could be reduced without weakening the business? When should work be delegated? How could revenue become sustainable profit? Which processes needed to become repeatable before growth created disorder?

The administrative beginning had become easier. Building the company had not.

Interest in starting businesses remains strong. The U.S. Census Bureau recorded 531,423 seasonally adjusted business applications in June 2026, an increase of 1.1% from May. The figure shows that a substantial number of Americans continue to take formal steps toward creating new ventures.

That activity creates a natural market for formation support. More prospective owners entering the process means more people confronting entity registration, tax identification, state filings and continuing compliance obligations.

Texas illustrates the scale of that opportunity. The state has 3.52 million small businesses, second only to California’s 4.34 million, making it one of the country’s largest potential markets for LLC services in Texas.

Volume is only part of the explanation. Texas founders forming an LLC must navigate requirements across state and federal agencies, including Secretary of State filings, registered-agent rules, federal tax identification and continuing state reporting obligations. That administrative burden helps explain the demand for services that simplify formation and compliance.

The logic is straightforward. More people are taking steps toward business ownership, large states such as Texas contain significant potential markets, and the formation process remains complex enough for outside support to be useful.

But these conditions say more about access to entrepreneurship than the difficulty of succeeding at it.

Registration has a defined result. The filing is accepted and the entity becomes active. Operating the resulting company has no comparable endpoint. Each completed task introduces another decision involving customers, money, people or capacity.

Making the entry point easier does not remove the challenges waiting beyond it.

Registration solves a defined problem, not the hardest one

The difference between forming and operating a business becomes clearer once the owner moves beyond administrative work.

The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2026 Report on Employer Firms found that reaching customers and growing sales was the most common operational challenge among small employer firms. Hiring or retaining qualified staff followed, while increased costs were the leading financial challenge.

These challenges cannot be solved through registration.

A formation service can help establish the entity, but it cannot create demand for what the company sells. It cannot determine whether prices protect margins, whether another employee is affordable or whether a marketing campaign will attract customers at a sustainable cost.

Financing pressure makes those decisions harder. 60% of firms in the Federal Reserve survey sought financing during the previous year. Among applicants, 56% sought funds to meet operating expenses.

This is where the nature of the work changes. Formation is largely procedural. Operating a company requires judgment under uncertainty.

Money allocated to customer acquisition cannot simultaneously fund product development. Hiring may create capacity but reduce the company’s financial cushion. Faster growth may increase revenue while also raising labor, support and delivery costs.

The correct decision depends on margins, demand, timing and the business’s ability to recover when an assumption proves wrong.

Costs, people and systems determine what happens next

Cost control is not simply a matter of spending less. Owners must determine which expenses create long-term capacity and which merely create activity.

Cutting too aggressively can weaken the product, slow delivery or damage the customer experience. Growing revenue can also conceal weak economics when every additional sale brings disproportionate labor, support or overhead.

Revenue shows that customers are buying. Profit shows whether the model can sustain the work required to serve them.

People introduce a different kind of complexity.

A founder who begins alone may eventually depend on employees, contractors, partners and suppliers. Work must be delegated without losing accountability. Expectations must be communicated before problems become urgent. Decisions that once existed only in the founder’s head must become understandable to other people.

That transition is difficult because delegation requires more than assigning tasks. It requires clear standards, useful feedback and enough trust for others to act without constant supervision.

Systems become important for the same reason.

During the earliest stage, the founder may personally remember every customer request, deadline, payment and delivery step. That approach can work while the volume remains low.

It becomes fragile as activity increases.

Processes held in one person’s memory can turn into missed follow-ups, inconsistent service and delayed decisions. The founder may then become both the company’s most valuable worker and its largest bottleneck.

Formation tools can reduce repetitive administrative work. They cannot decide how a company should price, sell, hire, communicate or consistently deliver what customers were promised.

The value of easier formation is the attention it preserves

Recognizing these limits does not reduce the value of formation services.

Administrative work consumes time and attention. Simplifying filings and compliance allows founders to direct more of both toward customers, finances, people and operations.

That is the real benefit.

The mistake is treating administrative completion as evidence that the business itself is ready. A newly approved LLC has a legal identity, but it may not yet have stable demand, healthy margins, reliable processes or enough capital to withstand a difficult period.

Those capabilities develop through testing, correction and repeated decisions.

Formation is therefore best understood as infrastructure. Good infrastructure reduces avoidable friction, but it does not replace the work built on top of it.

Easier LLC formation is meaningful progress because it creates a clearer starting point. The hard part begins when the founder must turn that legal entity into a functioning company.

The filing creates the entity. Execution creates the business.

I have used an LLC formation service myself. It organized an unfamiliar process, clarified the required steps and helped turn a business idea into a registered legal entity.

The service did what it was designed to do. It made formation easier.

But once the LLC existed, the difficult questions remained. How should limited capital be used? Which expenses could be reduced without weakening the business? When should work be delegated? How could revenue become sustainable profit? Which processes needed to become repeatable before growth created disorder?

As I write this, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up over 12% since the beginning of the year and more than 20% over the past 12 months.  It’s boom times in the markets.  But make no mistake: sooner or later, there is going to be another significant stock market contraction. History guarantees that much. What history doesn’t tell us is when.

Over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has fallen more than 10% on 25 separate occasions and more than 20% six times. People overbuy, overvalue and overextend themselves. It’s just human nature.  This time will be no different.  Back in the day, there were banking, internet, real estate, junk bonds, recession, inflation, energy and war crisis which caused stock market contractions.  Today, there are many of the same factors, with the addition of crypto, terror attacks, AI and data center over-investment. All, most or any of these factors will contribute to the next contraction.

No matter how much you may want to deny it, the stock market has an enormous impact on your business. Customers delay purchases, banks tighten lending standards, investors become more cautious, employees get nervous about their 401(k)s, owners see their personal net worth decline, vendors become more aggressive about collections, hiring gets postponed and capital spending is curtailed.

If you’re like most business owners, you’ve got your company, personal, retirement and college fund savings invested in the markets. So do your employees. So does everyone else. When the markets drop, it causes a collapse in confidence in the economy. People feel less wealthy, and they get scared. The impact reverberates.  Economics is not a science. It’s an art. It’s psychology. It’s emotions and feelings and confidence and moods.  When there’s a blow to all or any of those factors, the impact is felt throughout.

This will happen. So, as a business owner, what should you do to protect yourself?  Here’s what I’ve learned over the past 30-plus years living through a number of stock market contractions.

For starters, pay attention to history

In 2009, during the Great Recession, the Dow fell from a high of 14,165 to 6,547.  That’s a loss of value of almost 54%. Imagine living through that. Like me, maybe you don’t have to imagine. It was ugly. But what eventually happened? The markets recovered. They always do. Now the Dow is more than eight times the value over its low recorded in 2009.   Know your history. Stay the course.

Check your greed

If you had your money in an S&P stock index fund, your $100,000 in investments from 2021 — five years ago — would now be worth about $175,000.  Even if today’s markets drop 20%, it’s still a pretty big win, don’t you think? If you’ve already made 70% over five years, giving back some of those gains in a correction doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly become poor. You’ve heard that the stock market generally outpaces all other markets over the long term. It’s true. Don’t be greedy. Be grateful.

Next, make sure your assets are diversified

I know it’s fun to speculate, but try to limit your investments in individual stocks unless they’re a relatively smaller part of your overall wealth and are mostly in companies with strong financials, well-known brands and that you regularly use and trust (For me,  it’s Microsoft, Amazon, American Airlines and Marriott). Keep the lion’s share of your stock investments in mutual funds, indexed to sectors and larger, more stable corporations. They will ultimately recover from a contraction. Also, if you’re able, spread your investments between stocks, bonds and real estate.

Take advantage of significant tax deductions

There are significant tax deductions when you lose money on a stock.  You can sell it and offset the loss against any capital gains up to $3,000 and then carry the rest forward.  In addition, you can use a tactic known as a “wash sale,” where you sell the stock and then buy it back after 30 days. You can then add that loss to the basis of the stock, thereby lowering your overall taxable gain in the future if and when the stock has regained value and you sell it. 

Get your financing in place

When markets fall, the banking industry tends to freeze up and everyone runs for cover.  They limit new loans and re-evaluate existing loans.  If you know this is going to happen in the future, then it’s best to open, secure and renew available working capital lines of credit for your business now so that they’re able to be used if you have any liquidity issues during a downturn. You may pay additional fees today, but consider it insurance for tomorrow.

Turn off the internet

CNBC will put red arrows on the screen. Websites will run photos of terrified traders. Experts who didn’t predict the crash will confidently predict what happens next. Ignore most of it. This is how we in the media earn our money — we create fear and we count the clicks.  Most of the stock market and economic coverage you’ll read will not make you happy during a downturn, so do your best to limit it.  For your mental health, turn down or turn off the noise. Go outside. Ride your bike. Walk your dog. You’ll find that the world is still there and looks exactly the same as it did before the markets fell. And it will look the same generations later.

Build your cash reserves now, so that you can buy later

If you’re able to do so now, try to accumulate some cash and put it in an interest-bearing account. Because when the market falls, all stocks will fall, even the ones of companies that have strong earnings, great brands and competent management. Those companies — as they always do — will recover and will probably exceed even their value before their stock declined. Your goal is to snap up a few shares at a discount so you can ride this recovery.

Finally, work with a wealth manager

You know your business. The stock market people know their business. Just like you rely on electricians, shippers, marketing agencies and accounting firms for their expertise, so should you be doing the same with your individual and corporate savings. Use a wealth manager and, yes, like all the others, pay their fees. It’s their job to maximize your returns. It’s also their job to console, comfort, soothe and calm you when the market falls. You’ll find their advice to be helpful, as I always do.  However, don’t just have one wealth manager: diversify with two or three. Meet with them once or twice a year and measure their results.

My best clients are always thinking ahead.  So should you and I. The markets are no different. We know darn well that there’s going to be a significant contraction; we just don’t know when. But, like so many other uncertainties that impact our business, that shouldn’t stop either of us from being prepared for this inevitable event.

As I write this, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up over 12% since the beginning of the year and more than 20% over the past 12 months.  It’s boom times in the markets.  But make no mistake: sooner or later, there is going to be another significant stock market contraction. History guarantees that much. What history doesn’t tell us is when.

Over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has fallen more than 10% on 25 separate occasions and more than 20% six times. People overbuy, overvalue and overextend themselves. It’s just human nature.  This time will be no different.  Back in the day, there were banking, internet, real estate, junk bonds, recession, inflation, energy and war crisis which caused stock market contractions.  Today, there are many of the same factors, with the addition of crypto, terror attacks, AI and data center over-investment. All, most or any of these factors will contribute to the next contraction.

No matter how much you may want to deny it, the stock market has an enormous impact on your business. Customers delay purchases, banks tighten lending standards, investors become more cautious, employees get nervous about their 401(k)s, owners see their personal net worth decline, vendors become more aggressive about collections, hiring gets postponed and capital spending is curtailed.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Success in business is often associated with confidence. Founders are expected to make decisions quickly, project certainty and inspire others to follow their vision. Yet the longer I have spent around entrepreneurs, the more I have come to believe that their greatest competitive advantage has little to do with certainty. The business leaders who continue thriving over decades are rarely those who believe they have all the answers. They are the ones who never stop learning.

Learning looks very different once formal education ends. No curriculum tells entrepreneurs what comes next, no examination confirms they are ready, and no graduation marks the moment they know enough. Markets evolve, industries are reshaped, and new technologies continually rewrite the rules. Those changes reward people who treat learning as a lifelong discipline rather than a stage of life.

Here are five lessons that have shaped my own thinking.

1. Learn beyond your industry

Many entrepreneurs spend years becoming experts in a single field. Expertise is valuable, but breakthroughs often arrive from somewhere else.

Some of the most innovative ideas in business have emerged when leaders borrowed concepts from psychology, architecture, healthcare, behavioral economics or the arts rather than simply studying their competitors. Reading widely is not a distraction from business. It is often where the next opportunity begins.

2. Use AI to gather information, not replace judgment

Artificial intelligence has transformed the speed at which entrepreneurs can learn. Market reports can be summarized in minutes, unfamiliar concepts explained instantly and emerging trends identified long before they become mainstream.

Those capabilities should be embraced. Judgment, however, remains a human responsibility. AI can tell you what happened. Deciding why it matters, what to ignore and which risks are worth taking still depends upon experience, curiosity and values. The most effective entrepreneurs use technology to improve their thinking, not to outsource it.

3. Success can become your greatest blind spot

Early-stage founders ask questions because they have no alternative. Established entrepreneurs sometimes stop asking because previous success appears to validate existing assumptions. Markets rarely reward that mindset for long. Customer expectations change, technologies evolve, and younger competitors often see opportunities that established businesses overlook. Confidence should grow with experience. Certainty should not.

Success also changes the feedback entrepreneurs receive. As organizations grow, people become less inclined to challenge the founder’s thinking. Teams naturally seek alignment, customers become more forgiving, and public recognition can create the impression that past judgment will continue producing future results. That is precisely when leaders need to seek out disagreement deliberately.

The willingness to invite criticism, question familiar assumptions and remain intellectually uncomfortable often becomes the difference between businesses that endure for generations and those that gradually become victims of their own success.

4. Your smartest teacher may not be your mentor

Mentors remain invaluable, but entrepreneurs who learn consistently draw lessons from unexpected places. The most influential teacher in your career may not carry an impressive title or decades of executive experience. Sometimes the person closest to a problem sees it more clearly than the person furthest up the organizational chart.

A dissatisfied customer may reveal more about your business than a consultant. A graduate joining the company may understand changing consumer behavior better than senior management. Competitors, suppliers and businesses operating in completely different sectors can all become teachers if approached with genuine curiosity.

Even failures deserve closer attention. Deals that fall apart, products that underperform and partnerships that never materialize often contain insights that success quietly conceals. Entrepreneurs who develop the habit of conducting honest post-mortems frequently discover that disappointment can become one of the most valuable forms of education.

Learning depends less on where knowledge comes from than on whether we remain willing to recognize it. The entrepreneurs who continue growing are rarely the loudest people in the room. More often, they are the ones who continue listening long after everyone else believes the lesson has ended.

5. Never confuse knowledge with education

Knowledge has become increasingly accessible. Education remains something different. Knowledge answers questions. Education teaches us which questions deserve asking in the first place. Entrepreneurs who continue learning throughout their careers rarely succeed because they possess more information than everyone else. They succeed because they continue questioning assumptions, revising their thinking and remaining intellectually flexible when circumstances change.

Entrepreneurship has never been a destination reached through expertise alone. Every stage of building a business demands new perspectives, unfamiliar skills and the humility to admit that yesterday’s answers may no longer fit tomorrow’s challenges. The entrepreneurs who endure are rarely the ones who know the most. More often, they are the ones who have never lost the curiosity that first inspired them to begin.

The future may reward an entirely different kind of entrepreneur from the one we have traditionally celebrated. For generations, business admired those who projected certainty, moved decisively and appeared to have all the answers. The decades ahead may favor leaders who are intellectually adaptable enough to change their minds, curious enough to keep learning and humble enough to recognize that every technological revolution creates questions no previous generation has had to answer.

Perhaps the ultimate measure of an entrepreneur will no longer be how much they know, but how quickly they can continue learning. In a world where knowledge is becoming increasingly commoditized, curiosity may prove to be the rarest and most valuable form of capital.

Success in business is often associated with confidence. Founders are expected to make decisions quickly, project certainty and inspire others to follow their vision. Yet the longer I have spent around entrepreneurs, the more I have come to believe that their greatest competitive advantage has little to do with certainty. The business leaders who continue thriving over decades are rarely those who believe they have all the answers. They are the ones who never stop learning.

Learning looks very different once formal education ends. No curriculum tells entrepreneurs what comes next, no examination confirms they are ready, and no graduation marks the moment they know enough. Markets evolve, industries are reshaped, and new technologies continually rewrite the rules. Those changes reward people who treat learning as a lifelong discipline rather than a stage of life.

Here are five lessons that have shaped my own thinking.