Think back to when you learned how to swim. If you were lucky, you started in the kiddy pool and progressed little by little to the deep end. But if you weren’t so lucky… you learned the hard way by being “lovingly” shoved into the pool.

Whether it was gradually or all at once, one thing is true no matter how you learned: Eventually, you just had to jump in.

“I instructed skydiving and… what I learned is that you really pack your own parachute, meaning that you prepare it, you focus on attention to detail, and you execute. And, just as in skydiving, in entrepreneurship, you can prepare as much as possible but at some point, you just have to jump.”

Dyan Gibbens is the President and CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, and jumping into things – or out of things, for that matter – is Dyan’s specialty. As a skydiving instructor and pilot in the military, turned entrepreneur in the civilian world, she knows what it means to be prepared for the inevitable leap.

And as she’ll tell you, in business as in life, preparation is the difference between barely keeping your head above water and being able to swim laps around your peers.