This one might sting a little, but it needs to be said:
You started your business for the wrong reason.
So did I. So did most people in fact. And it’s this misguided ambition that lies at the root of most business failure, sooner or later.
It’s a bitter pill when you realise it. It’s like your business is cursed, and you’ve been kidding yourself all along. You suddenly understand why things haven’t quite been working, and you feel so stupid.
You might feel that way at the end of this essay.
But the good news?
It’s not too late to change it.
So what is it? What is this bad motivation which underpins most businesses – condemning them to mediocre performance (or worse)?
Greed.
Yes, you and I, we started our businesses because we are greedy.
Generally the logic goes something like this: you’re doing a job for someone else, and doing it well. You know that you are capturing only a fraction of the value you’re creating for your employer. And what is more, you have no control. You want to be your own boss. You want more time, more flexibility, more freedom, more glory, more money. You just want more.
And so the solution is obvious, isn’t it? You start out on your own.
You take the thing you were doing for a salary, and go and do it on your own terms. How hard can it be? After all, your idiot boss was making it work – and he’s way worse at this thing that you are.
And then… things turn out to be a bit more complicated than you thought.
Turns out your new business doesn’t only involve doing the thing you love – but a whole bunch of other stuff besides. Other stuff you decidedly don’t love – and frankly kinda suck at. You end up with more freedom on paper, but less freedom in reality. You look at people on the train, reading novels on their commute to work, and long wistfully for the days when you could do that. You look at people on vacation, and realise they’re actually on vacation – unlike you, whose idea of relaxation is doing “only” 4 hours of emails a day rather than 10.
Why the hell is this so hard, you wonder?
And you never realise that the answer lies in your “original sin”: your greed in starting a business with no other goal other than to serve yourself.
Ah. Do you see the issue now?
Businesses that succeed do so for one very simple reason: they give something new to the world. They succeed because the founder saw something the world lacked, and created it.
You on the other hand only saw something that you lacked. You created a solution for your own problem – not the world’s. And then worse, you acted surprised when the world ignored it. “Why is the world not bending to my desire to get more money and more freedom?!”
Well why should it? Why should it when the entire founding principle of this business was to take as much as you could, and give nothing in return?
This is the precise reason why most businesses are so strategically feeble. They offer nothing new or needed precisely because they were born from some employee’s desire to do exactly what they were doing before, but “on their own terms”. In other words, they were explicitly built as a duplication of some prior model.
By contrast strategically powerful brands are those started not with the desire to take something, but to give it. Their founders were motivated by the desire to put something new into the world, something that the world needs – and so naturally when they do that, the world pays attention.
A good way to think about it is with this question I like to ask new founders:
“What’s your innovation?”
Most of them can’t answer, for the obvious reason that their business isn’t built on an innovation at all. The need for it never even crossed their minds, because they were too focused on their personal ambitions.
But the hard truth is that businesses without innovation should never be formed in the first place – because innovation, and the desire to bring something different to the market, is the only legitimate reason for starting one.
All else, is greed.
So look, that’s the bad news. But the good news is that this diagnosis isn’t terminal. You can fix this – and in fact I would say that fixing this is the norm for most businesses that eventually make it. Very few are actually founded on a genuinely “giving” vision. We all need that initial prod to get us going, and naturally greed is probably the most effective prod at our disposal.
What counts is that you mature past it, and eventually stop asking:
“What can this business do for me?”
…and start asking:
“Why does the world need this business?”
I started my business just as greedily as anyone else. I had none of the “giving” ambitions or insights I do now. I was just a jobbing consultant, trying to charge as much as possible for as little as possible – like we all do. But over time, I started to notice which bits of my activity provoked a flicker of interest from the world. And I pulled on this thread, until an innovation – a gift I could give – started to emerge.
You need to take yourself on the same journey.
Because trust me, building your business around what it can do for others isn’t just a “nice” thing to do. (Trust me, if greed worked, I’d have no hesitation in recommending it to you). It’s actually infinitely more effective in delivering on your selfish desires than any selfish strategy ever could be.
So stop thinking about yourself.
And the world will start thinking about you.
