19th June:

Hello, remember me?

I thought I’d break this work-imposed exile briefly just to share a few thoughts relating to the concept of going into business. It’s a subject that has been on my mind a lot recently, and I find aspects of it fascinating.

When someone starts their own company, they generally do so because they either have a great idea and want to commercialise it, or they are particularly good at something and want to make a career out of it. Fair enough, you might say. There may also be elements of ego, not wanting to work for someone else and wanting to make your fortune in the mix too. Again, not unreasonable.

However, here’s the paradox: the business grows and expands and takes on more employees. It moves to bigger premises. Some of the original people who have been there since the beginning may move on to do other things. And then one day, many years later, the MD finds himself sitting in an office surrounded by people that he barely knows, all of whom have mortgages and families and bills to pay. The company has gone from a small group of people wanting to take on the world to this. It’s become…a brand. An organisation. An entity in its own right. With shareholders to match.

As a humble employee myself, I sometimes wonder how a business owner must feel as they watch the business they started change and develop over time. How can a business grow and still maintain the sense of fun, the vision and the hunger that small companies often have? How do you stop the administration, the processes, the systems, the HR issues and all the infrastructure that a company requires getting in the way of the original motivation for starting up? Or do you simply sigh, shrug and accept the fact that those heady early days are no more and it’s no longer your vision that matters the most?

I once worked for a man who seemed to genuinely hate what his company had become because it could run quite happily without him being there. And that offended him. But he wouldn’t stand aside and give up his position, because that idea offended him even more.

Sometimes I wonder who needed who the most…