Peak Performance

Now 33, Brattland traces his entrepreneurial roots back to that fateful set of tapes. He would sit in his truck between sealcoating jobs, listening to the tapes. Each night, he wrote down what he had learned and how to apply it to his own business.

But Brattland wasn't content to just dream; he became a teenage miniconglomerate. In addition to the sealcoating business, he started a valet parking service for local restaurants, then started selling "automotive orphans"-dealers' unsold inventories or remnants of rental-car fleets.

Eager for entrepreneurial success, he was less than enthusiastic when his parents insisted he go to college. He left after a few years and returned to his recipe-for-success books and tapes, studying them intensely. He undertook an exercise he had learned from the tapes: interviewing winners to learn their secrets. One of the people he spoke with, a man who promoted sales training seminars, persuaded Brattland to join his company as a salesperson. He soon veered off in pursuit of better money with a multilevel marketing company. When that business folded two years later, Brattland was left empty-handed.

After back-to-back setbacks, he looked for a way to turn crisis into opportunity. Says Brattland, "It brought me back to my true love: personal and professional development programs."

This article was originally published in the July 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Peak Performance.