Reflecting on 20 years as a business founder/owner

Part 1 (of however many of these people seem interested in reading)

I wanted to start my own business when I was at university, maybe even earlier than that. The thought had crossed my mind even in high school. I’m not sure that I ever really knew why though, perhaps that’s what led to my relationship with my business being what it is today. Let me explain…

I started Axios with my best friend, something they say you shouldn’t do. I’ll come back to that point later. Neither of us had kids (yet) and we treated Axios like our first-born child. Everything Axios produced was like an extension of us, and it genuinely felt amazing to get good feedback and, at least a few times, Dan and I could be found down the pub crying on each other’s shoulders and drowning our sorrows over a few pints after bad feedback. It was clear we had formed an emotional attachment to the business, its customers and later its staff.

I think many serial entrepreneurs would say that you need an exit strategy before you begin, and that such an emotional attachment isn’t helpful. Perhaps it can stop you being objective when times are tough and you have to make tough decisions. Certainly, with later businesses I have founded or been involved with, I’ve tried to make sound management decisions, maintain quality outcomes for customers, be compassionate to staff but be less ‘attached’ to the business at the same time. (I have kids now and have less in reserve for the emotional ups and downs of more ‘business kids’.)

Coming back to my point about starting a business with a best friend, it absolutely can work. Dan and I (and later Scott, who joined as a partner shortly after the founding of the business) sat down and worked out every situation that could cause turmoil at a later stage. We had a list of about 20 things, including ‘what happens if we run out of money?’, ‘what happens with any profits we make?’, ‘what happens if one of us dies?’ and ‘what happens if one of us wants to exit?’. We answered those questions calmly and with consensus (before we even started trading), documented everything and that became our playbook. We recognized early on that in the heat of the moment, we may not make good decisions, but having a playbook we all agreed to would alleviate that. This playbook was used on several occasions, but I’ll talk about that in a later post.

We also set up a yearly strategy session including our version of the ‘airing of the grievances’ (like the Seinfeld version, but without the aluminum pole). We correctly guessed that would be tough going, but better than ever letting anything build up to a breaking point.

Finally, we decided how we would deal with each partner working more or less hours as their personal lives allowed for over the years. We decided that, within certain parameters, we would pay for every hour we worked, so that nobody could come back later and claim that they were owed a bigger stake of the equity.

In hindsight, and given our lack of experience with business and really not seeing a bunch of other things on the horizon, we did our planning to stay together very well. I’ve been asked for that list of scenarios from many people over the last 20-years, which probably says something.

Coming back to the emotional attachment, it’s clear now, that back then we were trying to set up a lifestyle business that we could enjoy, chase the work that interested us, and be together for a long time. We didn’t know the pressures of market ups and downs, gaining and losing customers or needing to grow at that stage. I dare say for an experienced founder or founders, these are best solved with knowledge and experience. All we had back then was each other, and for inexperienced business owners we managed to leverage that into good solutions to issues as they arose. I’m not necessarily advocating getting into business without any experience, but it can be done if you’re passionate, put the time in, and make people and relationships the first priority.

I’ll touch on a few more of those points in my next post.