Example Blog
BIG as ****!
Rich Turner
My company is YUGE! 驚天動地で巨⼤な会社だねえ!
ゴジラ
Your Big Idea, hatched lovingly in to your Thing, slithers away in to the
ocean deep. You bite your nails, spend all your waking hours fretting
about it. In the abyssal profundity it feasts generously on the nourishing
radioactive soup of initial sales, and slurps mightily on the isotopes of
growing brand awareness. Suddenly, one calm morning, its dorsal fin
crests above the surf, and onlookers gasp in awe as your errant Thing
resurges…as King of the Startups!
A monstrously good beginning. Or? But how did this happen?
You developed a product — Check.
You found customers — Check.
You expanded beyond just you — Check.
Now there’s payroll, the start of delegation of responsibilities, actual
schedules that mean you have to be somewhere at a certain time to…
meet…and…discuss something. “What’s the agenda?” That unnerving
day when you realize you don’t know everything your people are doing,
and you have to start loosening the reins? “The Horror, the Horror!” you
gasp in Conradian alarm.
The wearing of many caps is startup fun for sure, but what’s in store?
Catapulted forwards on your success, it’s tough to understand how you
may actually wish to structure your achievement. If the prevailing
sentiment of the times is ‘grow your small business’, ‘build a fastgrowing business’, and ‘get out of startup mode’, then isn’t the #1
mandate to ‘get BIG as ****’ as soon as possible?
Let’s back up a second. Before you do anything, operationally it makes
total sense to check a few mental boxes:
1. Hire good people you trust.
2. Focus on what you’re good and happy at.
3. Also focus on your customers. Listen to their feedback to reduce risk hugely early
on. Free!
4. Face forwards, and be ready to roll with the punches so you can adapt.
Ok? Feel good? So what’s next?
Wee / Klein / Small / Petit / ⼩さい
Well, plenty of small businesses are doing great, while remaining…
small. ‘Main Street’ companies are now 53.1% comprised of the little
folk. And we’re not talking leprechauns. That percentage means
businesses of up to four employees total. Let’s take the ‘craft revolution’
as an example. This is not something that will wither and die off soon.
It’s simply focussed micro-trends that are indicative of a greater megatrend of deep yearning for ‘real stuff’, empowered technologically via
ubiquitous information access. Craft beer, artisanal bread, ‘hand-cut’
sandwiches (please, how else would one prepare the noble repast?),
bespoke tailoring and probably ‘hand-thrown’ pottery…we are searching
for a connective thread between the origin of products and what their
story means for us. Despite the somewhat episodically douchey nature
of such product descriptors to our collective lexicon, it’s all just a kneejerk reaction to decades of mounting mass-consumerism and
diminished personal involvement in commercial interplay. The act of
trade is an experience intrinsic to humanity, and the quest for human
interaction once more within that simplest of daily tasks is one of the
stories of our times. “They gurrrn took urrrr traaade!”. Maybe people
just want to trade again on their own terms?
The point is:
“Small is beautiful”
The eponymously titled book by E.M. Schumacher talks about the
human tendency for ‘pathological growth’, and how the only direction
we know seems to be ‘big’. Play any endlessly addictive world building
game and you understand the thrill of constructive growth. However,
now that we are all functionally mobile, we need to address the fact that
any growth structure is vulnerable to that mobility. Big Business loves
‘agile’, ‘lean’, and ‘nimble’, but Godzilla, or for that matter any enormous
Unicorn born of our ‘idolatry of gigantism’ (nice one Schumacher!), is
hardly fleet of foot now, are they?
As a slight digression, let’s be cognizant of the fact that, as cities grew
from metropolis to the necessarily more grandiose megalopolis, our
nomenclature for companies has similarly evolved in step. If you
thought our elusive, noble, and rainbow-****ting $1B valuation friend
the Unicorn was a rare sight, then it’s possible that equine commercial
evolution will soon present us all with the Decacorn ($10B) and the
immeasurably leviathan Hectocorn ($100B).
It’s all rather corny, to say the least. It does however illustrate our need
to adequately deal with the concept of ‘big’. And the bigger the beast, the
harder it falls. In fact, the risk bubble associated with such massive
businesses, once burst, may even leave the financial detritus of ‘dead
unicorns’ in its wake!
How we shovel up calamity: Opportunities for post-bubble commercial gain.
Human Scale.
Small, profitable businesses are generally run on human capital. That’s
to say financial/accountancy services, realty, the ‘home-starter’ stuff
that lets you commute in your pyjamas and never to an office. Great
news for the service sector. Hurrah!
However, technology has driven positive winds of change for all of a gig
economy or entrepreneurial bent. Aren’t we all starting to move in this
direction anyway? Being super flexible, informatively proactive, and
open to multiple income streams that can both enrich your bottom line
as well as diversify your potential to fire up the neurons and be your
creative/intellectual self? We live in a wonderful time, People, and
jumping on board opens up countless opportunities to let the world
experience your human self! This, therefore, is also human capital, as it
expounds upon the term as more than just economic utility. It’s an
expansion to the many ways we can now convert our individual talents
into economic, societal, or global benefit through the assistance of
technological connectivity. Not a Keynesian unit of measurement!
Let’s say you start your Idea, club together with your besties, and find
that you have a solid group of fused talent. You inherently understand
each other, respect your strengths and weaknesses, and couldn’t
imagine not plugging in to that same vibe in your work everyday.
Success in terms of growth can mean necessarily losing some of that
vibe, as the core group will become stretched across responsibilities,
departments, cities, and continents. The greatest challenge of big
companies is how to retain their early culture, the flavor of excitement
that bred such creativity. Of course it is.
So what are the major upsides of being small?
Time — owning your own. Watching a clock circle round to 6pm, then
cramming in everything else you need to do to be sane is, well, insane.
Sure, running your own gig will suck up a LOT of your time, but at least
you can mold it to your life where needed, not the other way round.
Job Security — hahaha. What’s that now? Guaranteed paycheck, end
year bonus to pay for vacations, and a golden handshake you say?
Different world now. Given the uphill climbing involved with corporate
laddering, and the sudden performance-related cuts, there’s no better
era than now in which to strike out and create your own security
instead. And let’s not even talk pension. That’s just French for ‘bed and
breakfast’.
Decisions — tossing in some risk makes it all feel so…alive. If you’re
making (or co-owning) the decisions, then you can also figure out how
you value yourself instead of pandering to somebody else higher up in a
political structure. “Oh I feel so underappreciated!”. Consign this to
corporate history!
Humanity — all the above come out the wash as a big win in your
personal humanity. Being your Idea/Thing/Brand, walking the walk
and talking the talk, it adds up to a Big Deal. Time, security, and risk
ownership all make those steps you take feel like your own. Perhaps you
won’t be strutting around like Godzilla, but maybe there’s a little of the
uncaged animal in there. It makes me recall Godzooky, Big G’s nephew.
I carried his plush toy around with me as a kid and enjoyed his humanscale moxy.
Somewhat monstrous, yet identifiable.
Whatever your vibe, while you’re small enough to have open horizons
you should take the time to figure out what’s in the game plan for your
business. Since the start of the century, the average new small business
size has dropped from 6.5 to 4 employees, and given that the number of
these outfits is set to grow from 30M to 42M in the next ten years,
something is making sense for people.
Tech the High Road
One trend is for sure, that however bewildering the commercial
decisions may be, getting your business up and running and then
operating it is becoming a more logical affair. Tech is not a panacea, but
it sure does improve our access to services that help us consolidate
business functions, do the numbers, communicate with customers and
even sell products. Emphatically, it’s about road testing and finding
what works best for you. You may need to discard many until you find
your nirvana, but this is time well spent. If you can make tech truly work
around your needs, while you’re fully mobile and doing what you need
to get **** done, then you may find that staying small and nimble is
really possible for your business. It may actually feel like the only option
that makes any sense.
I would love to hear your stories. Whether it’s how you want to scale
the heights to Unicorndom, or just keep it solo or mildly tribal.
However it jives, how do you keep the human touch in your
Thing/brand/service?
Hollywood University scientists examining the effects of Big Business,
yesterday.
Tagged in Startup, Entrepreneurship, Unicorns, Work
By Peripatetic Rat on October 6, 2017.
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Exported from Medium on January 16, 2018.