By Ari Rabban, CEO of Phone.com 

One of my biggest and earliest struggles as a small business leader was learning to be patient while creating and adhering to a business model that cultivated growth. Ultimately, after considering the business landscape, my team and I decided against the type of free-services approach some companies take that, while offering a lot of buzz (free service, after all), is very risky—in our case, it would’ve been too costly. Instead, we built an innovative business for an underserved market that didn’t rely on hoping for a buyout, which has ended up working really well.