So many people feel 2009 was the worst year of their lives.

But the pain of the late 00s has cleared the way for tremendous success in the coming years. People will be pushed to do things that they never would have done in good times.  Out-of-work graduates, former cubicle and factory workers, and laid off executives are taking the leap and starting new businesses.  Entrepreneurs who have been struggling at failing businesses are being pushed in new directions as they discover the old ways don’t work anymore—or maybe never did.  Liberated from the tether of a job or forced by necessity, many will thrive in new businesses and become multi-millionaires—some will go further.

Yes, it’s been a hard couple of years.  One client went out of business after thirty storied years as a local retailing star.  For decades she broke DC in on the latest fashions from Paris and beyond.  She had world-famous designers flying in for trunk shows and she was famed among the local moneyed class for elegance and a discerning eye.  She would sit in her showroom holding court with her teacup-sized dog in her lap, regaling the upper crust with thrilling tales that alternated between witty and bawdy.  Then someone made off with a chunk of everyone’s money.  Sales plunged.  Things got quite quiet.  Tumble weeds rolled through the chichi mall she called home.  Bills piled up.  Vendors hounded her for payment day and night.  Her landlord huffed and puffed and finally blew the door down and booted her out.  Now she doesn’t even have a job, much less a legendary local boutique.

Another client, a group of talented architects, remembers The Day.  September 15, 2008.  Wall Street was having a bad bear day—something about Lehman Brothers going bankrupt.  Back at the ranch, among the blueprints and protractors, the phones stopped ringing.  They didn’t ring for the rest of 2008.  Or 2009.  No one has a backlog big enough to sustain that kind of dry spell.  If they had crashed in the Andes, at least they could have eaten each other. 

We all should have seen the next one coming.  My mortgage broker buddies experienced the mother of all crashes.  One day they’re closing a billion dollars per day in liar loans, cash-out re-fis and teaser rates ARMs.  They’re shoveling the cash out of their way so that can walk down the hall to get another Dom Perignon out of the vending machine, picking world cruise trips out of brochures and checking on whether NetJets will follow their favorite rock bands across Europe.  Next thing they know, the media, Congress and the public are treating them like piñatas, they’re getting sued, and then they’re broke.

People have lost their jobs, houses and health insurance.  One dear friend is staving off the fourth foreclosure attempt on his house and he’s enduring his second winter without heat.  People who always had a job and never once took a vacation for more than a week have now been out of work—for the first time in their lives—so long that they’re running out of unemployment benefits and health insurance.  People who sent their kids off to college and saw their own parents off to Florida are now taking them all back in.

So, yeah, 2009 (and 2008 and some of 2007) sucked.

Now this next part is going to sound like my Mom did when she told me to ignore the bullies in junior high school.

Good will come out of all this dreariness, failure and pain. 

In this blog and my upcoming book, How to Build a Business and Sell It for Millions, I return from the battle front and bring you the rules for winning in business.  In a decade, when you’re tooling around in your flying car, you’ll be looking back at today as that great beginning of your success in business.

Here in this video, we start with the five critical components for success in business.