What I’ve learned after 14 years in bricks and mortar businesses
(BTW I don’t re-read my blogs – so sorry about typos, grammar, spelling etc…)
I have co-founded 6 companies in my life and acted as CEO of all of them. 5 did something and 1 crashed and burned. They were all small businesses with the largest one having annual revenues of $8M or so, which means that I was very much involved in the daily operations and was able to learn tons.
Each business got away from me in some respect. The issue mainly was that we were involved in businesses that required talent outside of what I could provide, namely engineering and assembly. We were never big enough to have multiple high paid engineers on staff so we always had once main guy, and that is a problem. You see I became reliant, as I could not design printed circuit boards and had no clue what the engineers were really doing. This fact made me at their mercy, always sitting waiting for engineering while I often watched my hard earned sales drift away. I think that the lesson here is that you have to grow with your business not outside your business, and what I mean by this is that my aspirations where bigger than the business and so I stretched more than the business could and ended up in positions of dependence that were caused by limited revenues. I think that the leader of the business, at least to get it going to certain level, should know how to perform all aspects of the business. In my case the leader/owner should have been and electronics engineer.
I also learned that terms like recession proof, are just fluffy terms. When we started in the early 2000s we though, as did lots of people, that selling to the government was recession proof and so we went on our merry way. In 2008-2009 all that changed as the economy tanked and the US government bailed out a bunch of businesses that, in my opinion, should have suffered their own brought upon themselves fait and simultaneously slashed government budgets. We were one of the companies that got some cuts which ultimately lead to us doing layoffs. What is boggling here is that the government reduced their purchases of goods they require to, in part, fund the bailout of companies that cause this big mess, strange.
Annuities, oh I wish I had an annuity. My businesses were only as good as your last sale, albeit sometimes they were 7 figure sales. I would have traded those in anytime if I could for something smaller that would last several years so that I could build one on top of the other. In my businesses it was conceivable that in any given month you could do zero sales, as we had no annuities, it never happened but it could have. The non-annuity model is oh so very tiring. You work, work, work, hope, close and start all over.
I could go on, but let’s see if anybody reads this, and if you do let me know and I will go on.
Recent Comments
1
Interesting post.