PPB May 2021

answered and the five pillars of success in place, you’ll be able to let your business take on its own life while you remain at the center, as yourself. Then, you will have become the passionate natural guardian for your own business potential and can guide, shape and steer it toward limitless possibilities. Don’t be afraid to seize windows of opportunity, like I did with the cigar business and humidors in 1998. If there’s a gap in the market and you see when, where and how to fill it, do it . Jump in with both feet, gain the experience and ride the wave until it has settled. I never thought I’d be entering the cigar business, but I had an idea, patented parts of it and leveraged it to build a small but profitable niche within the market. Sometimes, that window of opportunity stays open longer than anyone thought possible. Sometimes it shuts quickly. But, if you’ve already stepped through to the other side by then, you’ll have taken that one idea, that one creation, to the next level and brought it to its full potential. Every experience in which you do that is one more tool in your collection, one more piece of knowledge added to your strong foundation, that will lead you to the next steppingstone in your own success. Reprinted with permission from The Money Will Follow and available, with this new cover, on Amazon. Michael Emoff is chief vision officer at Dayton, Ohio-based distributor Shumsky and at Boost Engagement, a company specializing in flexible online rewards and recognition programs that engage participants and drive results. He co-owns the companies with his wife, Anita. He has a degree in marketing from Indiana University. Their son, Adam, 14, has been writing best-selling books since he was 11 and has authored 23 books. He formed his first LLC at age 10 for a paper airplane idea he and his friends created. | MAY 2021 | 65 THINK