HATTIE: Hi. I'm Hattie Bryant. We created this program to help the millions of us who have a business and to encourage those of you who want to start one to go for it. Today's program is about a company who's been to the brink of failure and now lives to tell about it. Every week here at Small Business School, you have the opportunity to spend 30 minutes with a pro, with a person who's willing to tell you how they've built their business. We call this 30 minutes a Master Class. Just as music students have teachers, they also attend Master Classes taught by professional musicians, pros who make a living doing music.

Now join our Master Class and meet a pro who has built a business, John Hawkins, Cloud 9 Shuttle.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Every day 35,000 travelers fly in and out of San Diego's Lindbergh Field. Once they arrive, they need ground transportation, and for a growing number of passengers, it means hopping on Cloud 9.

Unidentified Man #1: Welcome to Cloud 9. I'll take that for you.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) I met the man behind the incredible turnaround of Cloud 9. Where else? At the San Diego Airport.

JOHN HAWKINS: San Diego's--it's an international airport, but it only does about 13 million people a year.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) John Hawkins and his colleagues took over a failing super-shuttle franchise, created a new company, and captured 75 percent of the shared-ride market. And this was John's first experience as an entrepreneur.

JOHN: Much of the stuff I've done through my career has been start new programs, create something out of nothing, but it was always for somebody else, so this was exciting because you're playing with real bullets.

HATTIE: Your money.

JOHN: I, with another fellow, came down here as part of a turnaround team to fix a very broken thing. We had fixed other broken things in our careers in big companies. What we probably didn't realize was that in the process of fixing those things, we had very deep pockets; and if something went wrong, you could just kind of pull out a great big cannon and shoot it and it would go away. It would be fixed. Here, we came in and thought we could apply all the smart business school textbook things and it would work like magic.

It didn't.

We did eight weeks' worth of investigations, due diligence and sorting things out and told the then owners that it was dead. It wasn't broken; it was dead. So what we had to do, we put it into Chapter 11, we turned it around, we stopped the red ink and the bleeding, fixed it up, shored it up and brought it out of Chapter 11 through some of the normal classic things that one would do to fix a company -- reduced wages, changed our marketing focus, sold assets ... did all those things.

In the process of getting it out, we sold our houses, we emptied our pockets, we did everything we could to save our own bacon and to save the bacon that we had put in the fire. You know, I worked for five years for no income. That's very hard.

HATTIE: How do you stay motivated yourself?

JOHN: Well, life is fun, you know. This is ... business is a great sport.

HATTIE: Wait a minute. You sold your house. You didn't take any income.

JOHN: Got divorced.

HATTIE: What?

JOHN: I had all kinds of loss.

HATTIE: You're one of these nice homeless people in San Diego.

JOHN: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, we were -- we got in so far that we didn't have any choice but to come out the other end of the tunnel.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) It's not surprising Cloud 9 won an award for San Diego's most enterprising business. You took a dead company...

JOHN: Got it back to life.

HATTIE: You renamed it. You re-invented it completely.

JOHN: Nurtured it for a little while.

HATTIE: Forget re-engineering. You re-invented.

JOHN: I think that's probably true. We changed it from a franchise to something that was independent, and we thought that independence would work in San Diego because San Diego doesn't like being a suburb of LA. And we were an LA-based company's franchise.

San Diego wants to be itself; it wants to have its own personality. I think San Diego does envision itself as paradise, and Cloud 9 kind of fit with that paradise-type environment and palm trees and sunshine, so all of that chemistry actually worked to our advantage. But the real guts of this was textbook, stick to the netting, follow the script, don't deviate from your plan, make it work based on solid business principles.

And as we went further down the line, we quit doing experimental things like what you might do in a big company because you couldn't fail.

We wanted to, you know, get singles; don't try for home runs. Get to the plate. Get a single, get on base, move the guy along, get him in, score runs, win games day in, day out, and so we started to try to do the real simple things, academically correct, day in, day out, and I think that that's what we do today.

What we do looks fun and flashy and cute, but it's really core business principles. Differentiate yourself, make yourself unique, become something -- brand yourself as a product that someone would want to prefer or name. Those are all business academics.