Don't Be A DownerTips to help you break free from self-sabotage

You want your venture to make it big, right? Subconsciously, youmay not. Take, for example, Rand Stagen, 29, the founder andpublisher ofThe Metmagazine, a Dallas publication thatcovers the local entertainment and nightlife scene. He started themagazine at age 23 with the aim of expanding it into a large-scalenational media company.

"When I started the business, I was unstoppable,"reflects Stagen, who has grown The Met into a $2.5 million venturewith 30 employees. "People said that a 23-year-oldcouldn't survive in a Top 10 media market [like Dallas]. But wedid it! We proved them wrong." After a while, however, Stagenfound himself engaging in self-sabotage. "As I developed mybusiness, I started getting complacent, thinking, `Yeah, we did it!Now I'm accomplished.' But what about the media empire Iwanted to build? As I started to realize how difficult it is tocompete on a local level, let alone trying to take on the world,the media empire was no longer the goal-it was to keepsurviving," admits Stagen. For the first time in his career,he began to have doubts, resigning himself to thinking that it wasmore realistic to be content with a successful localpublication.