We've always prided ourselves on the fact that we're a band that the whole family can enjoy together.

I love watching new acts find their footing. It's fun to watch them early on in their careers and get a gut feeling about who's going to be a superstar.

It's really easy to be grounded again when you get back home, and you sing in front of 20,000 people a night, and your wife hands you the kids and tells you it's your turn to be on diaper duty and take out the trash. So it's easy to keep things in perspective when things like that happen.

I think Christmas, for me, has always been about family, as cliche as that sounds.

There were so many years that were going by at a lightning speed that it was so hard to kinda put our heads around what was happening to us.

You need to continue to find ways to engage fans to keep them excited about what you're doing.

I think the thing that keeps us motivated is challenging ourselves to see if we can be better than we've been before and seeing if we can stumble upon a magic that wasn't there before - whether it's a song, a performance, or a track that lights us up the way the first few records did.

A lot of people still don't realize that, before Rascal Flatts, I was in a Christian band for four or five years, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest pop musicians and producers in L.A. I learned a lot from Peter Wolf; he was one of my heroes growing up in the '80s. He was a producer of a lot legendary pop music.

I remember as a little kid watching the Opry from the nosebleeds, so to stand onstage and be invited to be a member was really, really cool.

To work with one of your heroes is the greatest things you can ever hope for.

I was an '80s child, so I grew up loving all kinds of '80s rock. I like R&B, too.

I think that anybody can go home, put the record on, and listen to it note for note, but there's very little entertainment value in that, I believe. When you give people something visually entertaining to watch along with presenting the music, I feel it makes it a lot more interesting.

I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'

I think the 360 deals are what stands out to me, first and foremost. I never would have dreamed that record labels would be taking a piece of touring, merchandise, and everything else. The world has changed so dramatically from when we first started.

If people would've heard what we were doing back in the clubs in the late '90s, they would be really shocked to find out how country our sound really was back then.

I love my time with my kids.

You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.

When you do an arena show, and the lights have to sync up to the sound, and the sound has to sync up to the music, and all of that - things are really mapped out, and you lose some of that spontaneity.

That's what we all hope and dream to do, when we stand in front of the mirror with our Goody comb and sing into it, is to have a bunch of songs that have touched people so much that they want to hear 'em every night.

I think our live shows dispelled any misconceptions people had about us. When you come see us live, you know we're anything but a boy band.

There is a huge difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. True success comes from failing repeatedly and as quickly as possible, before your cash or your willpower runs out.

The very first thing I tell every intern on the first day is that their internship exists solely on their resume. As far as I am concerned, they are a full-time member of my team. For all the negative stereotypes about millennials, you would be astounded by how hard they work when they believe their contribution matters.

Onboarding starts with satisfying the most basic of Maslow's psychological needs: belonging. New hires shouldn't arrive to an empty cube and be forced to forage through corridors searching for a computer and the bare necessities of office life. A new hire isn't a surprise visitor from out of town. Plan for their arrival.

When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success.

State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.

Targeted marketing delivers a lower customer acquisition cost and gets you to profitable growth faster. The goal is to quickly identify the costs associated with acquiring your most profitable segment of customers and the incremental value - if any - of going beyond your core.

There is no better feeling than doing well while you are doing good. If you really want to meet the nicest, most caring people in your field, get involved with charity work. The thankless hours that go into planning charity dinners, running a carnival, and gathering donations for silent auctions are noticed and appreciated.

From the very first inkling of a concept, founders need to gather a target group of five to ten potential users to begin the feedback loop. We all think we know how the market will react to new ideas, but actual users live with the pros and cons of the existing market conditions every day. They are the market experts.

Big ideas developed in a vacuum are doomed from the start. Feedback is the essential tool for building and growing a successful company.

Numerous studies, and my own experience as a serial entrepreneur, have proven that companies with a diverse management team provide greater financial returns to investors.

Instagram, Swiffer, and Nest had to compete with consumer habits and perceptions. Breakout products face competition from the formidable inertia powering the status quo.

Creating something that builds lasting value and changes the lives of millions of people requires forging a team that will work hard to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, stand up to the pressures of fame and fortune, and stay true to the original vision long after others stop believing.

Instead of focusing the traditional planning cycles where companies benchmark their businesses against existing competition, teams need to be developed to foster internal change and disruption. Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel.

Some incubators, like Y Combinator and TechStars, were started by successful entrepreneurs wishing to help the next generation learn from their experiences. Other programs, such as Viterbi Startup Garage and Austin Technology Incubator, were created by universities to help young entrepreneurs bridge the knowledge gap from student to funded company.

To effectively reach consumers in the new social environment, brand managers need to learn how to translate their budgets into the digital realm, which also means understanding the advantages that digital can provide over television advertising.

Design is how you make your first impression with your consumers. Make sure it is a lasting one.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.

On average, it takes as much as $100 million in paid media for a brand to be a household name in America. Marketing partnerships are the best form of off-balance sheet financing one can ever find. Smart startups use this technique to scale their companies and build their brand equity.

You don't need to be an engineer or a tech person to benefit from technology. You can hire them.

Every new startup business creates new opportunities. It doesn't matter whether you have a new app for college students or a home medical device for senior citizens; there are other multibillion noncompetitive corporations that are spending millions of dollars trying to market their goods and services to your same audience.

Networking is all about connecting with people. But then again, isn't that what life is about? The more time you can find to get out of the office and build true friendships, the farther your startup will go. Entrepreneurs need to remember to spend as much time working on their business as they do in their business.

By maintaining an active feedback system at every stage of a startup, founders can reduce their burn rate, increase their virality coefficient, and retain key hires.

For all founders, going public is a momentous milestone that has to be experienced to be fully understood. It is the culmination of years of hard work and personal sacrifice.

The strength of brand loyalty begins with how your product makes people feel.

With less and less television being watched live, consumers are enjoying the freedom to record at home or in the cloud, watch locally or on the go, and binge watch entire series that they never had the time to enjoy.

Television programming is the number one topic on Twitter, and dozens of start-ups in the social space are linking second-screen experiences. People no longer need to sit on the same couch to enjoy a show together.

YouTube began as a failed video-dating site. Twitter was a failed music service. In each case, the founders continued to try new concepts when their big ideas failed. They often worked around the clock to try to overcome their failure before all their capital was spent. Speed to fail gives a startup more runway to pivot and ultimately succeed.