Very well said, Clinton!

I wish I would have had that type of clarity 25 years ago.  I'm sure it would have save me (and my businesses) some time in school of hard knocks.  I spent many years building great technology and expecting that it would just fly off the shelves because everybody would understand how great it was.  It didn't happen that way.

After a few years of frustration, I hired a business consultant--a retired BIG COMPANY employee--and the first thing he said was, "You need to write a real business plan."  Much to my chagrin, my wife (who was the company president) and I spend several months studying what that was really all about, and with the help of our consultant and a bunch of folks from a local entrepreneurial group, we wrote a real business plan.

Within a span of one year after that, we successfully raised a little money, became way more visible in the industry, negotiated a significant OEM agreement with Unisys, and sold our company to a Fortune 500 software company.

Blindsided neglect of the business side of our technology business had clearly been holding us back.