Despite all my research, I wasn't really prepared for a random assortment of things. My view of selling, for instance, has changed a lot.
I now make very sharp distinctions between marketing and selling, which were totally lost on me when I started. I have developed enormous respect for selling. If anyone comes to me today and says, "Gee, I'd like to help you do strategic thinking and marketing," I say, "See you later." I would have talked seriously to him five years ago. What's the difference? Strategic thinking and marketing mean you don't want to get your hands dirty and sell. Sellers are invaluable. Strategic thinkers are a dime a dozen. I went through a couple of them until I realized how the selling function worked.
That raises the whole question of holding onto people. I guess I've learned the lesson in that Kenny Rogers song, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run." That's a very, very useful piece of advice, and I never fully appreciated it. I guess I was much more inclined in the beginning to hold onto people with some notion that somehow, eventually, they would work out. I'm much more inclined now to say, "Let's look at it for six months and if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, let's quit." I think I should've come more quickly to judgments about people than I did.
Another thing I discovered is that profitability is not really a problem -- cash is always the problem. They're very different. In my kind of company, profitability goes all over the place and is really quite manipulatable. If you want to grow, you expense every dollar you've got and keep it working in the company. Cash flow is a constant issue if you don't go for large outside financing, which we've chosen not to do. You've got a fixed payroll. Everything on the expense side is fixed, and everything on the revenue side is variable. Somebody gets sick and doesn't pay up on his receivable, or a salesperson gets lazy and doesn't sell for a couple months. All of a sudden your cash flow goes to hell. You find yourself constantly managing cash flow. It's a major issue.
My personal experience with the company has been more rewarding and more aggravating than I thought it would be. People have grown enormously, and that's been satisfying. Then there's the whole process of building an organization to do something that I, as an individual, cannot do. It's been very rewarding. The frustrations and aggravations are extraordinary as well: all the things you don't know that you've got to figure out. The constant cash-flow struggle that you deal with all the time. The constant worrying about the selling process and how that will work. All of the personal concerns that come with any family or community.
The one thing I hadn't banked on at all is the extent to which a company becomes a community. I thought people would come to work, do their jobs, and go home. I didn't think they'd have babies and get married and get all wrapped up in each other's lives the way they have. I spend a significant amount of my time trying to make the members of the community cooperate with each other. It can be a positive force because it brings a cohesiveness to the firm. But I hadn't thought about how much time I'd have to spend adjudicating the frictions in that system so it remains a positive force -- balancing all the interests. A small company is like a huge extended family, with all its intricacies. One way or another, I spend probably a quarter of my time on this. I hadn't planned on spending one percent. It's way out of proportion relative to my expectations going in. Tom Peters could have told me that a long time ago, right? I just didn't understand exactly what he meant, and now I do.
"Back when I started my company, I really didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. I mean, that word wasn't even popular yet. I don't remember what the language was back then. . . . I was too busy running a company to worry about what to call myself."
-- SANDRA KURTZIG, 42, founder, ASK Computer Systems Inc.
"When I was starting out with VisiCalc, my goal wasn't to grow a business. I just wanted to get the product out and perhaps use it to launch a company. I hadn't given much thought to the future or where it would lead.
What I found out -- and I had no idea of it then -- was how much one individual and his company can do. We've learned in the past decade that small companies can change the world. We've seen them do it."
-- DAN BRICKLIN, 37, cofounder, Software Arts Inc.; developer, VisiCalc, first personal-computer spreadsheet; founder, Software Garden Inc.
JOHN NATHAN
48, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, whose work includes In Search of Excellence and Entrepreneurs
For a long time, I had contempt for business. I was a Harvard Ph.D. in literature, teaching at Princeton, so I thought business was bullshit, and I said so. I now consider business to be a fascinating science, something that's worthy of attention.
I've been in the presence of some powerful and original business thinkers, and I've been very impressed. I have "management" problems with the few people who work for me. Yet these guys run companies with 80,000 people. It's an amazing feat.
From what I have seen, guys like that -- Jobs and Kapor, for instance -- are insulated to a remarkable degree against self-doubt, which is the source of power in many men who are able to control their worlds. Steve Jobs doesn't sit around short-circuiting his effectiveness by wondering if he's on the right course. None of them do. I've longed for that insulation from self-doubt a number of times myself.
They seem to have a highly articulated vision of the world they inhabit and of how they want it to be. I can be thrown deciding what color to paint my house. But this allows them to proceed without any stumbling. I've been in the living quarters of Jobs and Doug Tompkins. These guys always tear down and build right up again; they have the energy to put into realization the smallest detail. It's an important empowerer; it allows you to communicate your vision to everyone around you with maximum efficiency and persuasiveness. There's a lot of power and energy in there.
