The history of commerce has proven time and time again that there is a market to be had for any good business concept. Sometimes it takes imagination to see beyond the idea to the reality it can become, and almost always it takes hard work, perseverance and, more times than not, a little bit of luck to get there. As most successful business owners will tell you, success means learning the lessons business ownership has to teach you, and it's a process that continues forever.

This is the story of one entrepreneur who turned his good idea into a thriving international business and learned many such lessons along the way. The road was often bumpy, and at times he was tempted to pack it all in, but he didn't. He persevered in the face of adversity and "clueless" bankers, continued to work hard, and today his business is thriving as it never has before.

Business opportunities can be crafted to match your interests and skills.

Despite all that, Dave, now 38, has had to bootstrap his business throughout its 20-plus years of existence. Certainly, that's understandable in the early stages of such an unusual enterprise. But once his mouthpieces were established as the high-end standard in the close-knit community of professional saxophonists--an accomplishment he achieved fairly early on--you'd think finding conventional sources of financing would become relatively easy, right? You'd be wrong.

Guardala's disdain of bankers is capsulized in a story he tells of one of his first attempts to secure a loan for his company, called, simply enough, Dave Guardala Mouthpieces Inc. "I'm trying to explain to this guy how my mouthpieces are machined from a solid bar of brass and plated with silver and gold," Guardala recalls. "His response was, 'Saxophone mouthpieces? Oh, yeah, I used to play sax when I was a kid. You're talking about the $5 black plastic thing that you blow into, right?"

SAME STORY

The story was pretty much the same anywhere Guardala turned for financing. As a result he has had to rely on earnings generated by his own company to grow the business and, in the early days, the support of a father who believed in his son's dream strongly enough "to hock his house" as Dave puts it.

It was a difficult time, but Guardala learned an important lesson: A creative approach to financing can make it possible to grow a business even without traditional avenue of funding.

Dave Guardala was surrounded by music throughout his childhood on New York's suburban Long Island. His father was a pioneer in the early development of high-fidelity audio equipment. He consulted for a number of start-ups that went on to become big successes, including Fisher Radio and Marantz. Later he went to work for RCA, a leader in the recorded music industry, where one of his duties was to go to the house of the late General Sarnoff every Friday to make sure all the RCA chief's televisions and hi-fi equipment were in working order for the weekend.

"Music was always in our household, and being exposed to it at an early age left a mark on me," Dave Says. He studied saxophone through high school and developed a keen interest in jazz--considered by many to be that instrument's ultimate medium of expression. His early aspirations were to be a sax player, and toward that end he played in several bands while completing a music program on scholarship at a local two-year college.

Targeting the right customer is crucial in the early stages of a business.

"I ate, slept and played sax and jazz," he recalls of those years. "I studied privately, copied solos off the greatest players' records, had a band, played at weddings."

Dave's entrepreneurial learnings also began to show themselves at an early age. Beginning at about age 12 or 13, he would scour garage sales for beat-up old saxophones, repair and rebuild them, play them for awhile, then sell them. "I have always been extremely mechanical and good with my hands, and my father was an engineer," he says. "I think that is the genesis of my business, which combines art, science and physics.

At about 15, Dave began working on mouthpieces for the first time. Finding the right mouthpiece can be a lifelong search for a skilled sax player, and the lack of uniformity in mass-produced units means the answer is rarely found there. Dave started out by devising ways to improve the performance of commercial brands and altering them. He came up with his first winner at about age 16.

"It just came out superb," he recalls. "I got all the right balances, and the buzz started to get around. Everybody wanted to try that horn and know where I got the mouthpiece. People began asking me to work on their mouthpieces, and I developed sort of an underground following."

The lesson he learned at that stage of his career was that business opportunities can be crafted to match the most eclectic array of interests and skills. It doesn't always have to be the other way around.

Guardala continued to alter commercial mouthpieces as a way to earn extra money while attending college, although he didn't consider what he did a true business at that point. The big change would come when he decided to make his own mouthpiece from scratch at about age 18. Working with a drill press and some hand tools in the basement of his home, he fabricated a mouthpiece over the course of several weeks. Even though it wasn't perfect, "I heard things that were far above anything else that was out there," he says.

HAND PRODUCTION

Dave continued turning out mouthpieces by hand, each time correcting some minor deficiency in the manufacturing process, but now he was thinking in terms of using the proceeds from that work to fund a more ambitious venture. His big break came when he won a commission form saxophonist Dave Liebman to make a mouthpiece for his horn.

"Dave Liebman is a famous sax player, although not so much in the commercial sense," Guardala says. "He is more well known in the cerebral underground of music, but he did enjoy a certain level of fame at one point."

Liebman played with the lies of Miles Davis and Chick Corea and held a "day job" as a teacher in the New York City public school system. To Guardala, he seemed older, more worldly, better-traveled. "The fact that he asked me to make a piece for him and then used it was very validating," he says. "It was the first major acknowledgement of my work."

Look for creative financing approaches when traditional ones are blocked.

Through Liebman's validation, Guardala began to receive calls from other famous sax players, including Michael Brecker (featured soloist on the Carly Simon-James Taylor hit "Mockingbird" and on many of Paul Simon's recordings) and, later, Branford Marsalis (erstwhile bandleader for the Tonight Show).

Liebman remained a friend and client for about a dozen years, but the two eventually had a falling out. However, that connection led to his relationship with Brecker, now Guardala's longest-standing client and, he says, "the most important source of inspiration in my life. He is the reason I am in this business today."

As Guardala learned through that experience, targeting the right client or customer in the early stages of a new business can open doors to meaningful growth.

One of the greatest challenges Guardala has had to face was designing and fabricating a mouthpiece for Brecker that would allow the saxophonist to continue achieving the range for which he was renowned, despite having ruptured the inside wall of his throat. "I tease him about having had to make an orthopedic mouthpiece for him," Guardala says. "But he credited me in an interview with probably having saved his playing career."

With the help of his father's mortgage money, Guardala began growing his manufacturing business in earnest at this point, relocating it from his basement and garage to a 7,000 square-foot factory in Bay Shore, NY, outfitted with the top of the line in machining tools.

Everything seemed to be going in the right direction for Guardala, and then he ran into his first big stumbling block. Despite the fact that his name is a registered trademark, unscrupulous competitors began counterfeiting his mouthpieces. "One guy would buy my mouthpieces and 'rework' them, then stamp them 'Guardala and his name,' as if we were a joint venture," he relates. "Meanwhile, I'm the guy who created this product, and I'm the one who's carrying $3 million in product liability insurance."

Guardala says he spent between $10,000 and $15,000 in legal costs trying to get the situation straightened out, but things went from bad to worse. The same counterfeiter hooked up with a well-financed partner in the costume jewelry business, and the two began counterfeiting Guardala's products right down to his trademark and packaging.

"Suddenly, I'm in federal court learning all about how vague the laws are in this area," he recalls. "It cost me about $50,000, a lot of tenacity and the help of one very understanding female federal settlement judge to get the injunctions I needed to bring an end to this situation and stop the worst of the damage."

Relying on presumed protection of the law may not always be enough.

Guardala discovered that relying on the presumed protection of law is not always enough to safeguard your business. "It was a tough lesson to learn, but it was an important one," he says.

TOUGH SAILING

The whole experience took the wind out of Dave's sails, and he found it increasingly difficult to invest the creativity required to keep his venture going. Then a chance encounter at a music industry trade show in Germany soon after the Berlin Wall was torn down breathed new life into Dave Guardala, both creatively and entrepreneurially.

Guardala met a German man whose company was taking over a series of factories in the former East Germany, including one that made saxophones. He shoed one of the instruments to Guardala, who quickly determined it was of such poor quality it was basically unsalable in the West. In short order, Guardala was hired as a consultant to oversee the creation of an entirely new line of saxophones that not only gave his company a new product line to sell, but also saved the jobs of hundreds of former East German workers whose factory would otherwise have been shuttered.

"It was really a life-affirming experience for me," he recalls. "In a matter of days, I put together a totally new design for the product and a workable plan for the plant that would make it. I was involved every step of the way throughout the plan's implementation. My fax machine and cell phone would go off in the middle of the night with plans going back and forth between my home and Germany."

Guardala learned through that experience that opportunities often arise out of adversity, and that entrepreneurs need to remain open to all possibilities.

Thirty-eight might seem early to "look back" on a career, but in the world of professional musicians someone like Guardala who has been a success for more than 20 years is a grizzled veteran.

"There has been a lot of personal satisfaction on a lot of levels," he says. "Our little company pioneered a brave new world and played a tremendous role in changing the way sax players think about their instruments.

"On the other hand, having to deal with the crooked elements, the counterfeiting, hardened me to an extent," he continues. "It diminished my artistic desire to the point where I didn't want to create any more new products just to put money in other people's pockets. The German saxophone venture came along at just the right time. It represented a rebirth of sorts for me."