Back when I was a business writer at The Miami Herald in the 1980s, I once complained to my editor that, at the ripe old age of 27, I still hadn’t written The Great American Novel. Sure, I had started at least a dozen of them, yet somehow I’d never managed to go the distance.
My editor gave me that world-weary look that editors typically give young reporters who are just a tad too full of themselves.
“People don’t write novels because they want to,” my editor told me. “They write novels because they have to.”
Twenty-plus years later, I still haven’t written that novel–and I probably never will. In the meantime, I’ve authored countless articles, columns and blog posts and five nonfiction business books. As an entrepreneur, though, it’s a different story. Somehow, when it comes to building a business, I’ve got the stamina to keep going until I reach the very top–and I’ve got the IPO to prove it.
That’s why, when a client told me last week that she had decided to scale back her plans to create the next big thing in web publishing, I found myself getting a little angry. Just last year when we first sat down together, she had told me that her goal was to build a gazillion-dollar business and sell it to Google. Seems that the uphill battle of raising capital in this recessionary market had taken its toll.
When I asked her what would motivate her to start thinking big again, she smiled and said, “I’d do it if an investor gave me $1 million.”
Of course, that’s not the way it works in the real world. Except in unusual times, like the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, an entrepreneur must first spend his or her own money proving the concept, then pitch it to investors with all the passion and persuasiveness he or she has got.
That’s why, in times as tough as these, many entrepreneurs are deciding that they’d rather go it alone.
Recently, I picked up a book called Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own by Robert Tuchman, a young New York City stock broker who quit his job on Wall Street to start a successful sports-marketing business.
“The reason I recommend self-financing for people who are just starting out is that fixating on some outside source of capital is a great way to make launching the business someone else’s responsibility,” Tuchman writes. “If you spend the entire first year talking about presentations so that someone else can take action or make decisions, your mind-set is wrong.”
So does that mean you should scrap your dreams to grow big fast?
Absolutely not, Tuchman says.
“You may reach a point, after the first year, where you decide that, for strategic reasons, it makes sense to bring in some outside funding. But that’s a later stage. Don’t spend your first year looking for funding instead of finding customers and delivering great results. During that first year, be the business. Do everything you can to fund it yourself and use the inevitable cash-flow pressures as motivation to track down customers.”
Do or die. Now, that’s the spirit!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
