When starting up your first business, there are a number of parallels between the relationship between the company and yourself, and the relationship between a child and its mother. You have to remember that in the early years the company is vulnerable and you will probably spend all of your time watching it, working on it, nurturing it, and even sometimes protecting it. Here are a few lessons that you might not get from any training programs in management that will help you manage and run your new business.
Remain patient. It could take a long time of working on your business to get it to grow and thrive. It won’t be able to eat on it’s own, or grow on it’s own without you around, and if you neglect it, it will die. If on the other hand you work with it, it will start to grow without you. There may be new people who help you out — think of these as your child’s friends and their parents. The company will need to be nurtured, but the goal of doing this is not to make you the only one who can run it, rather to make it so you can step down if need be and let it continue to move without you. You can not achieve this without patience.
Everything in time. When a baby is first conceived it takes nine months, give or take, to be born. When your idea is first conceived don’t be discouraged if it takes some time before you can bear it and bring it into this world. More than that, there is a time and a place for other events too. Mother’s wean their kids off breast milk at just the right time, sometime before it starts to rot their baby teeth, but after they can assuredly eat solid foods without a problem. This is not something that happens a couple months after the the baby is born. Set out a time schedule, try to stick to it, but also use your gut and don’t be surprised if the company is ready to move ahead at a slightly different scale. The problem with this analogy is that often times a mother will have intuitive sense about when it’s right to start a kid on new things, after all she can pick up very subtle features from the child that others might not. A company doesn’t get those feelings, so when in doubt, stick by a conservative time schedule.
Remember that while you can learn a lot of business techniques from things outside of the business culture, it is also good to get some business training under your belt if you don’t already have some. This will save you a lot of time trying to figure out the who, what, why, where, when and how in a lot of situations.
Related posts: