To understand how to succeed you need to first understand why so many people fail.

If the statistics are to be believed, four out of five businesses fail within their first five years.

Of those that are left, four out of five of them will fail within the next four years.

This means that, of 800,000 businesses now operating in Australia, there will only be about 32,000 left in nine years!

A whopping 768,000 will have either closed down, been liquidated, merged, been acquired, changed direction or become a new business.

The more shocking statistic is that, of the 32,000 remaining businesses, only 5,000 or so—that's 15 per cent—will be making a significant profit.

The remaining 27,000 will barely be surviving.