Starting up: Running a business is a roller-coaster ride – but it’s worth it

Fifty bucks and the freshly emptied garage of my nondescript West Valley home – that’s where every decent Treasure Valley success story begins, right?

If you would have told me then, as I looked around at those plain, white, unfinished walls, that seven years later I might legitimately affect the globe, I would have thrown you out. Proves you just never know, but there is only one way to find out.

I jumped in with both feet and didn’t look back. The rest is nothing but the roller-coaster ride of risk and worry, pride and triumph that anyone who’s ever started a business knows all too well. It’s callused hands, early mornings, missed Little League games and constantly juggling which late bill is the heaviest; but tucked between the stress and strife are brilliant moments so alive it’s suddenly all worthwhile.

Those moments, for me, are solving the problems that no one else could (getting paid is nice, too). That’s it. That was my secret for staying. That is how I took $50 and turned it into Industrial Insulation Systems, a $2-million-a-year industrial contracting and manufacturing business that’s about to launch a newly patented product line that may change the world!

By Dan Aragon – Special to the Idaho Statesman

Full Story: http://www.idahostatesman.com/business/story/539284.html