Ian Reisner, co-founder of Parkview Developers, talks about the mistake of hiring family members, and why you must never underestimate your competition.

Topic: The business of family

Ian Reisner: One thing as an entrepreneur, you are always looking for ways to cut costs and very often you hire family members and a couple times I had family members involved in the company and that often would be a big cause of stress and debate and fights. So I'd be very careful to mix business and family; that's what one lesson that I learned from being an entrepreneur.

Topic: The competition

Ian Reisner: Never underestimate your competition and their ability to be more creative and copy what you do. Right after we opened the first store, Sunglass Hut started to copy us and produced a copycat chain called Watch Station. They literally took pictures of our stores, they hired away our workers, they wrote down our exact product mix and they copied us. And they actually opened 45 stores while we only had three. We went from one to three and they went from one to 45 in the same timeframe. Fortunately, we understood the watch business better than them and we understand the nuances of service and the right selection and we managed to beat them in terms of sales per store throughout the country. But I think one lesson is never underestimate the ability of your competition to copy you and beware of that and be prepared to fight.

Recorded on September 14, 2009