Make No Small Plans Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community

From the founders of the acclaimed Summit event series and community comes the story of their unconventional journey to business success and the hard lessons they learned along the way.

“If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, Make No Small Plans shows how the Summit team did it.”—Ray Dalio, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

In 2008, with no event production experience and two college degrees between the four of them, Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz became business partners and set out to build a global events company. With passion and tenacity, they began cold calling as many inspiring company founders as they could and tried to convince them to attend their first event. In the beginning, only nineteen people said yes.

Since then, they have grown Summit into a global community with events all over the world, hosting luminaries including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Shonda Rhimes, Brené Brown, Kendrick Lamar, and Al Gore. In 2013, the Summit founders—with help from their behind-the-scenes co-founder and partner Ryan Begelman—acquired Powder Mountain, the largest ski resort in the United States, with a dream of building a mountaintop town of the future.

In Make No Small Plans, they reveal the triumphs, mistakes, and cornerstone lessons from their journey, which began during the Great Recession and continues today. Alongside teachings from some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs of our time, the authors offer takeaways such as:

• No idea should go unspoken.
• Reputations are earned by the drop and lost by the bucket.
• The road to success is always under construction.
• Become a favor economy millionaire.

Entertaining and empowering, Make No Small Plans shows that anyone can think big and—with a thirst for knowledge, a talented team, and a little humility—accomplish the impossible.

Elliot Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz are the founders of Summit, a portfolio of companies that includes Summit Series, a global events company best known for creating immersive events and experiences for a community of entrepreneurs from around the world. They are the co-owners of the largest ski resort in the United States, Powder Mountain; co-manage Summit's consumer tech venture fund, the Summit Action Fund; and are actively involved with Conservation International, Beyond Conflict, Council on Foreign Relations, Anti-Recidivism Coaliton, and Drawdown Fund. All four founders are sought-after speakers and have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, and Fast Company.