Still, going into business for himself should have seemed more chancy. He knew how to bill out his own time, but he had never even been close to watching someone else make payroll. To be fair, a couple of years earlier he had hired another trainer, selling him on the idea by assuring him that he would be relieved of the cost of finding new clients for himself. In the end--the arrangement unraveled after about six months--the employee jogged off into the sunset with some of Taylor's clients panting behind him. "I wasn't very professional in the way I managed him," says Taylor. "It wasn't structured and formal enough."
Acquiring such personal skills isn't the only challenge that Taylor and other local entrepreneurs have to meet. Any business novice in Las Vegas seems to face a couple of seemingly archaic hurdles. Unlike other cities--the ones with the decaying cores--Las Vegas has no obvious money trail: there are not many venture capitalists or high-profile business angels or empathetic bankers (granted, a rare species anywhere). It helps, of course, that most of the start-ups tend to be service businesses, meaning that entrepreneurs aren't seeking vast sums. To launch their wedding-cake business last February, cofounders Cindy Cowan and Manfred Schmidhuber rounded up $15,000 from their friends, selling stock in Creations by C&M Inc. "We just needed to do some advertising," Cowan says. There's not exactly a flood of mentors in the desert, either; TEC Worldwide is now in the midst of cobbling together a Las Vegas group.
Taylor may have had little know-how about business, but he knew plenty about how business got done in Las Vegas. "I could not have tried to do this when I first came here, in 1982," says Taylor, who moved to Nevada from Los Angeles. While attending the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Taylor (who is six feet tall and 190 pounds) played defensive back; his teammates included future pro quarterback Randall Cunningham, now of the Minnesota Vikings, and Ickey Woods, the former Cincinnati Bengals running back renowned for his distinctive "Ickey Shuffle" touchdown jig.
All that tush-tapping camaraderie, as it turns out, wasn't bad preparation for starting a business in Las Vegas. With an infrastructure that still hasn't caught up with its exploding population--the whole state of Nevada still answers to the same area code--Las Vegas remains a place where getting things done requires what the locals refer to as "juice." Taylor knew as much from his clientele. "People here are tied together," he says. "You've got to get one person who knows the entourage: the casino owners, the builders, and the doctors." Everyone's looking for deals, but people are also acutely aware of the attraction the city holds for fly-by-nighters--and they don't want to get scalded. Coletti needed to be in business awhile before clients for whom she was building homes "began asking to invest in our commercial projects," she recalls. Palladino, the cop-turned-restaurateur, didn't get money from the usual suspects, either. He teamed up with a couple where one member is a pathologist and the other is a therapist.
Long before launching his health-club business, Taylor had exploited the community's closeness to build his client base. Send me a friend, he'd urge a client, and I'll train that person free for a week. After that, the friend could sign up for Taylor's services at $30 an hour, roughly $5 above the going rate at the time. Within months of giving up his sales career, Taylor was handling more than 60 sessions a week, bunching as many as 12 in a workday that began at 5 a.m. and concluded 17 hours later. In a city where the rush hour typically begins at 3 p.m.--the roads choked by construction workers ending their day while those on the night shift embark on their prework errands--Taylor would be on the road for three hours. "If I got caught in traffic"--which became less of an if with each arriving newcomer--"my whole day would be off," he says.
Which it was, luckily, one day in 1996, when an accident tied up I-95 as Taylor was tooling his way from an outlying suburb to see a client on the west side of town. When he showed up, 20 minutes late, his client offered a suggestion. "You know what?" Frances Sponer told him. "You should have a place where everybody comes to you." What she said next harked back to what had first lured her--and just about everybody else--to Las Vegas: "You could make more money that way."
"My ears perked up," says Taylor, who replied that he doubted his clients would go along with the idea. You have influence over them, Sponer countered, they'll follow you wherever you go. In what he likes to call a "formal market survey," Taylor tossed out the idea to a few clients, just to see how they would respond. Sponer, as far as he could see, was right.
That was no surprise, given her entrepreneurial background. Having migrated from southwestern Pennsylvania in 1985, Sponer has owned 14 companies (with combined revenues of $30 million), most of them health-care related. How she ended up with a trucking business--and her reasons for wanting to get a piece of the paving, striping, and flagging market--seems best explained by her overall strategy, which she expresses with a purely Vegas flavor: "Turn up a lot of cards, and eventually you'll get a hit." Her losses included an eight-month attempt to break into health-care services for jails (total loss: $15,000) and a short-lived sleep-disorder clinic that slipped into a coma because it was "too early to market." As she built her companies Sponer was so frequently approached by others who wanted to bounce business ideas off her that she began sharing with them a tool she had developed for her own use, with the genial title of Francie's Venture Criteria Grid. "It forces someone who might be in love with a deal to get to reality and think about every single point," she says. "I just kind of help people do what I have done."
