Every time a plane crashes, while tragic, Scott Ginsburg also say it’s a learning opportunity for the future.
“Anytime the FAA goes out and looks at the scene of a plane wreck, they’re trying to learn something about what happened,” he says. “Was it wind shear? Was it equipment failure? Was it a personnel failure? And usually it’s categorized around those two or three or four things, and then all those pilots go to this case and learn what happened — don’t let it happen to you, learn something.”
If you stick around in business long enough, inevitably you’re going to fail, and Ginsburg has seen those times during his career, but he’s also learned from failures — both his and those of others. He’s had a successful nearly two-decade career in radio broadcasting, forming several successful radio groups during that time. Now he’s leading 1,500 employees as the owner of Boardwalk Auto Group, a chain of automobile dealerships, and chairman and CEO of DG Fast Channel Inc. (Nasdaq: DGIT), a provider of digital media services to the advertising industry.
“(Failure) didn’t happen every time, but the failures taught us a lot about how to succeed,” he says. “We had failures with specific stations or specific managers or specific markets, and those failures created a huge MBA program for everybody because you spend wildly on failures — millions of dollars — but you learn from those failures, and that’s the beauty of business.
“Every day you can change what you do. You can take an incorrect, ill-advised policy and change that to one that’s forward-thinking and plausible.”
Throughout the successes and failures, Ginsburg has learned a few universal truths to successfully running a business: take responsibility for your business, address needed changes and build customer relationships.
