Yes, You Can, Too, Argue with Success: A Review of Simply Success, by Jack Miller

Yes, You Can, Too, Argue with Success: A Review of Simply Success, by Jack Miller

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In an era where entrepreneurship is often romanticized with promises of quick wins and “work smarter, not harder” clichés, Jack Miller’s Simply Success: How to Start, Build, and Grow a Multimillion-Dollar Business the Old-Fashioned Way stands as a refreshing, no-nonsense antidote. 

Its title conveys the author’s conviction that one’s prospects of building and growing a multimillion-dollar business are greatly enhanced by following some very basic principles and guidelines—ones he learned over 43 years of growing his company Quill, from a one-man operation in his dad’s live poultry shop to an office supply retail giant, with close to 800,000 customers and over $630,000,000 in sales. And it’s those principles and guidelines he shares with would-be entrepreneurs in these pages.

While the book is written for those seeking to grow a business, the guidelines are valuable to entrepreneurs of all stripes. Including those (like myself) working to grow an educational nonprofit into a multi-million dollar organization, creatively meeting the needs of our consumers (students) and delivering superior returns on investment to our customers (donors).

Indeed, as I sit here writing on a Sunday evening, having put in a full weekend of work, I’m buoyed by the author’s refreshing realism about what it takes to succeed: “It comes down to two words: ‘work hard.’...to be a successful entrepreneur it’s going to take a heck of a lot of plain old hard work. Very hard. Very long hours. And that cuts the potential competition down a lot.”

It’s why I glower when anyone in my orbit uses the ubiquitous phrase, “Happy Friday,” or worse, “TGIF” (thank God it’s Friday). If you regard your work as something you simply need to endure in order to get to the weekend, the chances of you, your business, or your organization achieving outsized success are slim to null.

Miller takes an equally dim view of talk about “living a ‘balanced’ life,” in which your work doesn’t crowd out time spent with family, friends, hobbies, etc. Miller offers this sober verdict: “From my experience and my observations, successful entrepreneurs don’t get to do all of that. The business just takes up too much of their time.”

It’s an important message that the current generation of young people, in particular, desperately need to hear. It reminds me of the time I asked a young hire where he wanted to be in 10, 20 years. He responded he wanted to be someone like our Chairman, who runs a global manufacturing company with nearly 4,000 employees operating in 12 countries. As I know from personal experience, that entrepreneur works all the time—not just on his business, but in guiding the two nonprofits he chairs. This young employee did not have the same appetite for putting in those kinds of hours. I have no doubt he’ll have a successful career—just not one that involves building and growing a multi-million dollar business.

As Miller recounts in Simply Success, part of the reason working full-throttle is a non-negotiable element of building a massively successful enterprise is because it sets you up to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. He describes a time in the late 1970s plagued by record increases in inflation complicating the task of guaranteeing the pricing they sent to customers in the catalogue mailings they sent to customers every three months. In order to deal with this, Quill upped their game to sending mailers every month, guaranteeing prices for just that month. The result? “To our amazement, as a result of these more frequent mailings, our business grew by more than 90 percent a year for the next two years.”

Perhaps my favorite chapter is one entitled, “You Can, Too, Argue with Success!” He makes the case that some people say “you can’t argue with success” as a way “to close off discussion of how something can be done better. People think they can avoid the hard, but profitable, work of finding ways to be even better.” 

I see that all too often in the nonprofit space in which I operate. Leaders who are successfully bringing in $10 million in donations annually will resist innovation and change saying “you can’t argue with success.” But if you’re in the “ideas transaction” business, at a time when technology is revolutionizing how ideas get transacted, not “arguing with success” is going to sooner or later lead to stagnation at best and failure at worst, as other more nimble organizations spot and take advantage of the opportunities you refused to even entertain. 

It’s the kernel of this “golden truth” that Miller urges every entrepreneur to remember: “As smart as you may be, and whether you are just starting or you have been in the business for a long time, there is always a better way to do almost everything.”

Arguing with success is, at bottom, about resisting the siren song of complacency, and constantly seeking for ways, small and large, to improve your performance. It’s also about refusing to buy into comforting narratives, and brutally facing reality. He recounts the rise of the superstores in the late 1980s, and warned at the time that “anybody who thought the way to deal with superstores was to ignore them and wait for them to fail was just putting their head in the sand—and it would get chopped off while they weren’t looking.” 

It reminds me of my favorite quote from Ayn Rand: “One can evade reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”

While other competitors evaded the reality of the challenge presented by superstores, Miller faced it forthrightly. To be cost-competitive with them, Quill cut their selling prices so much that their gross profit margin took a huge hit. To address this, he recruited every single employee to look into every nook and cranny to find cost-savings. Within a year, the cost-cutting initiative succeeded in putting the company back into the black.

Little wonder that eventually, one of those superstores—Staples—approached Quill with an attractive offer to buy the business. Here too is a valuable lesson for avoiding “the mistake of being seduced by the arrogance of success.” Staples kept Quill as a separate entity, respected Quill’s company culture, and even learned from Quill’s expertise.

Simply Success is more than a how-to guide; it’s a rallying cry for those willing to pay the price of greatness. Miller’s emphasis on never settling and constantly seeking out ways to innovate for the better offers a timeless framework for entrepreneurs—in all walks of life—who aspire to build something extraordinary.