Setting Your Own Yardsticks
Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
I read a tweet the other day about a founder who was worried that his company was growing at “only” 25% a year and, as a result, felt he needed to get bought.
Now, to any objective observer, if you were to set up a business that returned 25% top line growth year over year, that would be considered, without question, a successful enterprise. I mean, we’ve all heard that stat about how 80% of new businesses fail within the first year. So then to not only get past that but to also flourish and grow, is a heck of an achievement.
So why would anyone - not least someone who’s actually in the trenches and building a successful, growing enterprise - consider 25% growth to be “not good enough”?
Two words: Rat Race.
Maybe not the rat race we all hear about - folks working at jobs they don’t enjoy, dealing with people they don’t want to deal with and lamenting the lack of material control they have over their working lives - but a rat race nonetheless.
It’s an entrepreneurial rat race that they’ve signed up for, of their own accord. And in many ways that’s even worse.
Because they’ve decided that what they’re building is not about solving a specific problem, it’s about money.
They’ve decided that the measures of success will not be their own, but those defined by the “money markets”.
They’ve decided that value is measured in terms of multiples and not in terms of impact.
How does this happen?
To be an entrepreneur is (ideally) the chance to take control of your destiny. So why do otherwise reasonable people think this way?
Because the allure of money and status overrides everything else, fueled by markets and investors that idolize and dramatize the exception for the norm: everyone has to become the next Amazon or Apple or Starbucks, or else you’ve failed (or worse, you’re not worth paying attention to). And if you live in that world long enough, it becomes intoxicating, you begin to believe it.
In reality, though, it’s actually toxic, and it’s fueled so much of the time by people who’ve never had to make payroll, never hunted for customers - never actually built a business.
And yet they buy into their yardsticks, and pursue performance thresholds that have nothing to do with “building”. They spend more time managing to metrics than they do talking to customers and thinking about the work that’s being done.
Stop.
If you want to live by someone else’s yardsticks, be my guest. But don’t delude yourself with alternate realities as to what you’re about. Don’t suggest there’s only one way. And, most of all, don’t belittle the achievements of those who given their heart and soul to build steady, successful businesses that have made a real difference.
Because at the end of the day, you won’t be measured by your pocketbook (at least not by anyone that matters in your life), you’ll be measured by your impact.
