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Mapping the Entrepreneurial Mind

Entrepreneurs struggle to find the energy and motivation required to continually grow their companies.

As their companies grow, most CEOs find themselves emotionally at sea, struggling to find the energy and motivation that was once so natural and exhilarating. Can the search succeed?

* * *

Douglas Peterson just wanted to confess it all to his boss: that he had begun to loathe coming in every day, that he had lost his affection for the company, that he felt stuck. In his imagination, Peterson had no trouble coming clean. But in reality, he could not do it.

In reality, Peterson was the boss.

During those dim months in the fall of 1989, the president and chief executive strode into his Elk Grove Village, Ill., office as if he were stepping into one of the spotlights his company, Pete's Lights Inc., manufactures. His role: pretending that the business, a $1.5-million maker of stage lighting, was thriving. He came in every morning with a big smile tattooed across his face and a bag of reassuring words to sprinkle all around. With his performance, Peterson gave the impression that he was deftly guiding the enterprise toward a bright financial future.

Nothing of the sort was happening. But Peterson believed that if he acted as downtrodden as he felt, everyone else would give up. "I was keeping us alive by saying over and over again that we would make it through," he claims. Management-by-mantra was his only refuge. A certified public accountant, he had started the business with his younger brother back in 1985. After one too many screaming bouts, his brother, who knew the industry, left in September 1989. Fearing customer reaction to his brother's departure, Peterson whittled prices lower than he should have. "We were barely eking anything out," he says.

So he faked it -- for as long as he could, anyway.

His undoer came in unlikely, if fashionable, garb. Just a couple of months after his brother's departure, Peterson began working with a new client, the singing group New Kids on the Block. Keeping the Kids kindled could add a precious $250,000 to the company's annual sales, he knew. "But I could not get my head into helping this client," Peterson says sadly. "I was worn out from everything that had occurred."

He lip-synched his part of the job at first, dispatching lieutenants to handle personnel and technical problems, and staying as uninvolved as possible. Then came a pair of calamities that brought his detachment to center stage.

One afternoon, while the crew was setting up the show, a spotlight broke off its hanging arm and fell to the ground. Nobody even bothered to tell Peterson. But he couldn't avoid hearing about an incident shortly thereafter involving a crew member's dismissal. The singing group's lighting director, enraged, reached for the phone. "I'm going to fire your company in two more seconds," he roared at Peterson. Despite the problems on the New Kids' tour, the only plane Peterson ever hopped was not to visit his customer but to take a weeklong retreat in La Jolla, Calif. "I just felt bummed out about the business," he says. "I wanted to be left alone."

He got his wish. It wasn't until he returned that he found out Pete's Lights had been fired. New Kids on the Block, a quarter-million-dollar client, was gone. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "I developed a major knot in my stomach."

Untying that knot led Peterson to separate the tangled strands of obligation and ego that bound him to his business. He confronted hard questions about where he had lost his motivation and why. When did the company become such a drain on him? What would it take to reinvigorate himself?

Most entrepreneurs start out their business lives motivated by drives they don't fully understand; as a company grows, they scramble to recapture that feeling, damaging their businesses and themselves in the process. Peterson was lucky. The crisis impelled him to forge a healthier relationship with Pete's Lights. It didn't come naturally.

"I realized I had lost the motivation to get out there and make something happen with my business," says the 34-year-old ex-marine. "I really sweated out some changes. It's difficult to do. But now I know how to stop those mental gyrations."

* * *

It sounds unbearably nostalgic, but that doesn't make it any less true: those days when you were starting out were the most motivating days you'll know.

Not necessarily because you were younger, though you undoubtedly were. Nor simply because you had something to prove, which you undoubtedly did. More than that, the circumstances you created gave you few emotional choices. If you couldn't rouse yourself to knock on yet another banker's door, the money wasn't coming. Whether you were packing orders in your bedroom/warehouse at 3 a.m. or patching together yet another barely serviceable prototype in the wee hours, the company was running your life.

Sooner or later that equation flips. The circumstantial din dies down. With less to feed on, that original drive you felt begins to weaken. "When I started out I was thinking, You guys fired me, so I'm going to open up across the street," says Keith Dunn, president and CEO of McGuffey's Restaurants Inc., in Asheville, N.C. "Two years later I grew up and realized that wasn't what life was all about."

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