Barry Moltz has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years.

After successfully selling his last operating business, Barry has branched out into a number of entrepreneurship-related activities. He founded an angel investor group, an angel fund and is a former advisory member of the board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation.

His first book, You Need to Be A Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business, describes the ups and downs and emotional trials of running a business. It is in its fourth reprint and has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Korean and Thai. Barry's latest book, Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, tells us how to develop true business confidence.

Barry is a nationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship who has given over 100 speeches to audiences ranging from 20 to 20,000. He was appointed by the Illinois Governor in 2005 to serve on the board of the Institute for Entrepreneurship Education (IIEE). He has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) and was elected to the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2004.

Moltz has written articles for many national publications and also wrote a chapter in the book State of the Art: American Angel Investing (The Darden School, The Batten Institute). Barry wrote the foreword for Penguin Books' new The Complete Idiot's Guide to Business Plans.

• You Need to Be A Little Crazy To Start and Run Your Own Business - The best way to debunk myths about start-up business is to tell the truth: You have to be crazy to start a business. Entrepreneurs live at the complex intersection of business, financial health, physical well-being, spiritual wholeness, and family life. Tidbits of insight will vaporize isolation, encourage self-reflection, and refresh the spirit of anyone running their own business.
  
  
• Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence - Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true-sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system. Both success and failure are simply outcomes in the lifecycle of business where repetition is inevitable and overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to "bounce" through these cycles determines who ultimately will succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers, and define our own brand of success.
  
  
• What NOT to Say in a Business Plan - Too often, we get so wrapped up in the business plan that we forget to do the most important thing: Find Customers! In the foreword of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Business Plans, (Penguin) Barry suggests that premeditated business should be outlawed. But even though business plans are mostly meaningless, the process of writing the plan is very worthwhile. This session describes the useful parts of the process and what can be learned by developing business metrics rather than damaging your credibility with worthless projections and overstated promises.
  
  
• Crazy Customer Service - Do you ever have nightmares where someone is chasing you and you wake up right before they catch you? Or dreams of showing up late to a test at school...naked? Barry Moltz never has these kinds of dreams. His nightmares are all about bad customer service. In this session, Barry describes how important excellent customer service is in business and how rarely we receive it. In the fast moving world where the Internet gives everyone equal access to price and information, "crazy customer service" becomes the only sustainable competitive advantage.