I am a very late bloomer and finding my path took a lot of time. Not necessarily effort, just time. I was already in my late 20s when I decided it was time to finish my IT Engineering degree and dive into the tech business. I had a lot of catching up to do.
Back in the day we started to get all of these stories about the Tech industry, Silicon Valley, Startups with ping pong tables and Founders making Billions creating super cool products. As any other tech savvy person with an entrepreneurial mindset, that felt like my jam.
Having found the passion and knowing I was already having a late start, the solution was easy: I’ll just work when everyone else isn’t. I made the math and I realized I could catch up on time lost in 3 years by working at least the equivalent to 6 years in the same time span. Easy. So I did that and more.
Well, it doesn’t really work like that.
The reason why it doesn’t is because there are no prizes for trying hard, only for achieving. And to achieve, or at least to maximize the changes of achieving, we need to pour those hours in the right things and keep moving forward, otherwise we’re just busy.
Groundhog day effect
My work ethic did serve me a great deal in the beginning as I was mostly focused on improving my hands-on technical skills and more hours of work meant indeed more results. I did manage to progress fairly quickly while working for others but that plateaued in no time. I found very soon that productivity has limits.
When I moved into the Entrepreneurial world, the same rules applied. In the beginning I would progress fast because whichever Product or Service I was working on relied on my time so of course things moved fast, but again, they plateaued. Worst than that, I reached my limit.
Focusing 100% of my awake time into a business by “just doing things that needed to be done” meant I was growing the capacity of the business by me doing more of whatever the business sold. Every day was the same “work comes in, work goes out” routine.
Growth & Scalability
Just working to get work out is not having a business, is maintaining a job at a certain level that can’t even go beyond that. The notion of “just hire more people” is not enough because I did that, and that only solved part of the problem. I indeed had more capacity but a business is much more than capacity.
A business is structure, a sales pipeline, a brand, a set of standards, a way of management, etc. And while I managed to get all of these eventually, a great deal of them were simply byproducts or even “accidental improvements” that happened to take shape because we tried something, it worked, let’s stick with it. So the focus was on keeping things running and experimenting with things instead of focusing on how to do stuff properly, one at a time, and then build on top of that.
All the while, constantly in burnout but having some solace in knowing that I couldn’t do more, not knowing that I could do different.
Compounding effect
Just like in money investments, it adds up, but you need to consistently build it, not sporadically and randomly change directions. A business as our personal growth path has many different aspects. The goal is to identify them, and go at them like you mean it, with a purpose and focus. Don’t leave growth (not in numbers but in value or knowledge) as an accidental consequence of surviving through something.
Take sales for example, the one thing I will probably never ever be very good at. While running (maintaining, at best) our software development company I had a delusional notion that if we keep doing this long enough, as in, delivering projects, our brand will grow and things will happen automagically. And to some extent it does happen but at a fraction of its potential. What I should have understood was that sales is a make or break quality of a business and I needed to nail that.
What I should have done all the way in the beginning was to identify sales as an key aspect, create the situation where the day-to-day is not 100% depending on my 16 hours of attention, and start to improve that, step by step.
The big virtue about compounding investments is that the returns are a direct reflection of how much you put into it, meaning, if you can only carve 5% of time to go into sales then it’s going to take longer, and that’s fine because things are moving in the right direction. As you capitalize on earlier investments, things will get better and you may now have 10% of time to focus on the next hurdle, and so on and so forth.
The only accidental byproduct of this should be that not only your business will thrive, but you will gain more knowledge. You will get to keep whichever lessons you have learned and forever keep building on them.
For the early Founders
If you’ve been here and have the instinct to think “yeah but I really can’t do that because I have no time/resources/help”, you haven’t been paying attention. Every now and then the thought of “am I doing the right thing?” popped into my brain but was immediately brushed off by the exact same counterproductive reasoning. There is always something, doesn’t matter how small it is, you can do to move things in the right direction.
It doesn’t take a lot of time, it just takes focus, commitment and intent. What’s hard is to change the mindset from what we know how to do (grind) and jump into learning what we don’t know how to do. Just remember that progress happens outside of the comfort zone.
You’re already working your ass off, might as well work in the right manner. You wont work less, but you will gain more, professionally and personally.
Final remarks
It would be unfair not to mention the book “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber as a must read. Sadly it took me many years to finally get around to reading it and by that time the book was more of a reaffirmation in audio format (because I do audio books) of what I’ve felt in my bones than the much needed call for action.