CarlPowell
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CarlPowell
Sixty Years of Navigating Businesses
by Carl Powell III
When I was in High School, my intentions were to go to college, study business, and come home to work with my dad in his business. I was as naive as they come. If someone had told me what was ahead of me and what I would have to go through, I may have chucked the whole concept and taken a factory job. Sometimes I have wonder if I would have been better off staying at NASA. I would have had a pension, retirement, vacation time, and would have been home nights and weekends.
But that was not me. Even with all the ideas I have chased, all the failures and successes, and all the grief and pain we’ve gone through, Susan and I have had a rich, full life, full of surprises, excitement, struggle, and gratification.
Carl Powell never imagined the wild river he would travel, nor that he would start, or work in, so many different businesses. One after another, he would startup, learn, and close. Learning valuable lessons each time. This is not a Path to Success book. It is reality. It’s based on real history and real businesses that thrived, struggled, succeeded, and failed.
From childhood resale schemes through forty ventures, and more changes than most people ever know — Carl spent a lifetime building businesses. Not all of them made it. A few he’d have been perfectly happy to keep small, if the next idea hadn’t come knocking.
This isn’t a get-rich story. It’s an honest one — about the pull to build, the cost of never sitting still, and the hard-won lessons hiding inside every win and every loss. Part memoir, part field guide, it’s the book Carl wishes someone had handed him at the start.
Whether you’ve started ten companies or are working up the nerve to start one, you’ll see yourself somewhere in these pages — and you’ll come away knowing you’re not the only one who can’t stop building.
Follow Carl through smooth water, white-water rapids, sharp turns, and unexpected falls through life and business. It’s a journey you will not soon forget.
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How to Build Businesses That Endure
In Still Standing: How to Build Businesses That Endure, Carl Powell shares over fifty years of real-world business ownership — building, losing, rebuilding, and stabilizing companies across retail, service, manufacturing, and franchise systems.
This is not theory. It is operational experience under real financial pressure.
A Journey of Faith
As a Christian, I have been told most of my life that I must surrender to God and allow Christ to be my Lord and Savior. I have spent most of my life trying to figure out what that means. We have little understanding of the word “Lord,” much less what it means to be subservient to someone or something.
Quips and Quotes Full of Wisdom for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Dad had a quick quote for almost any occasion. Over the years, I not only remembered these, but applied them to my life. You probably have heard most of these and will enjoy hearing them again.