Leaving a stable job and the financial risk to us and others adds a pressure that is hard to fathom.  Wait there’s more – we haven’t started running the business yet.  In the early stages of any venture, there is so much to do.  Big picture decisions are coupled with hundreds of details.  Sales, marketing, finance, operations, technology, customer relations, human resources.  This is often accompanied by limited capital, few (if any) team members and no certainty of success.  Quite the contrary, each of us is faced with the reality that most new ventures fail within a year.  Forgot to mention, we might move the needle on our business and find out that no one needs our product or service. And people ask you “what is entrepreneurship?”

Then, what happens when you get actual customers, employees and vendors?

When we started our company, we needed technology to administer incentive programs.  At the time, it was me and Randy working around the clock.  We hired a technology consultant who helped us source technology vendors to build our technology platform.  We wanted a company that had both software development and a call center.  While our service was to be web-based, we wanted individuals to talk to a human if they wanted.  We had very little money so we looked outside the New York/New Jersey area for inexpensive vendors.

Randy was from Rhode Island so we started looking in that part of the country. Fortunately, we found a company in Vermont.  Our main technology criteria was to use Oracle databases.  At the time, we had about six months to build the platform.  We had countless calls and drove many times to Vermont for meetings with the vendor.  We had invested two months with this vendor.  After many trips and phone calls, we made a final trip to Vermont to go over the final details of the contract. 

We asked to have one final discussion with their head of technology development.  When we asked how many Oracle resources they had, the head of technology said “oh we don’t use Oracle that much.”  Our jaws dropped.  We had discussed Oracle from day one.  They also communicated that their pricing which we had been negotiating for some time was not based on using Oracle and that the price would double if we required Oracle if they could even do it.  After some intense discussions, we left with no vendor and a huge gap in our plan.  Describing this as a kick between the legs was an understatement.

Just when we feel like we have things under control in an area, the shit hits the proverbial fan.  We were no different.  This makes sense – you don’t have the capital or resources to properly manage or execute.  For example, with the right resources, we would have had a primary technology vendor and a backup vendor in case something didn’t work out. Nonetheless, we dusted ourselves off from our Vermont debacle and moved forward.  Or so we thought:

We left the meeting with our Vermont vendor and immediately turned to alternative vendors.  Randy researched some and we came across a Florida-based company that had both the technology development and call center services we wanted.  After a few weeks of discussions, visits and negotiations, we struck a deal.  They would develop our technology infrastructure and serve as our call center.  We only had a few months until our launch.  Whew! Disaster averted.  Or was it?

Our vendor was unique.  They were a subsidiary of a larger company.  This subsidiary had been successful in developing the backbone for one of the early successes of the Internet –pornography.  They developed a scalable technology platform that could transition an old school business with heavy dependence on photos and videos online and a call center to deal with customers.  Given this success, their parent company set them up as a separate development subsidiary to come up with the next big idea.  They fell in love with incentives.  Incentives were used in every sector of the economy and they loved the idea of bringing scalable technology to another industry that, like pornography, was going to be prevalent across the United States economy

We worked together for months and were about seventy percent done with our technology backbone when the bottom dropped out.  But we were thirty days from launch and I got a call from the President.  He said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but our parent company is shutting us down.”  He explained that while the pornography solution had been a success, their parent company didn’t think that having a development arm was in line with their company direction. 

The President, who I still know to this day, told me that they fought to stay in place, and when it was clear that the entity would be disbanded, fought to finish our project.  To no avail.  He also told me that this news was not public, that his team didn’t even know, and he called me because he wanted me to know before his team started scrambling for jobs.  I’ll never forget the President putting his neck on the line to tell me about this news before he even told his team. 

I asked the President if his team was going to lose their jobs.  He said that a few of them might be offered jobs with the parent company but that was speculative at best.  I asked him if I could hire the team.  He thought that was a great idea.  He arranged a conference call with his team and me that immediately followed the meeting in which he would tell his team the news.  We offered to pay the team the money that would have been paid to their company, which was far more than they were getting paid individually.  Within a day the entire team had accepted.  They flew to New Jersey for a week.  We didn’t miss a beat.  We were in better shape because the team was now dedicated to us versus being spread over multiple projects. 

Come to your entrepreneurial venture with your big girl pants on.  While it shouldn’t be this way every day (and if we heed the lessons in this book it won’t be), there are days that feel like this.  Get used to being comfortable with being uncomfortable.  Needless to say, this is not for the feint of heart. And people ask you “what is entrepreneurship?”

Perspective #2: No One Cares as Much as You Do

We lose perspective as entrepreneurs.  One of the reasons I wrote this book is so we can recognize that and manage ourselves and our teams through it.  We lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world does not wake up with the passion and focus that we do.  Something has spurred us to take this wild journey to create our venture.  Our heart and soul are in it.  Our business life and personal life (if you have one) are intimately intermingled.   We think about it twenty-four hours per day and our dreams are not of sipping pina coladas or a relaxing day at the spa, but rather having our first yoga class with real paying students.  We must accept that this is a unique place that we occupy and if we expect others to have the same perspective, we will be disappointed.

No one cares as much as we do.  It is unlikely anyone else is losing sleep, shunning their personal lives, or investing their heart and soul.  We have this expectation that anyone associated with our venture wakes up with the same visceral desire to see it come to fruition as we do.  This comes to life in many ways:

Work Ethic

Needless to say, while it is important to have people who are dedicated, driven and hardworking, to us this is oxygen.  If we are lucky, to others this is not just a job but it is unlikely that it is an obsession.  For me, it wasn’t the work effort of my people, it was my (lack of) perspective.

When we started Our company, I had been a corporate attorney at a New York law firm for a few years.  For anyone who knows anything about New York corporate lawyers, they work long hours.  When we started Our company, even though I was working around the clock, I might have been one of the few people that did not work longer, crazier hours when they started their company.  My expectations were that anyone who saw the vision that I saw to fix the healthcare system with rewards for healthy behavior would be driven to work as I was.  I became disappointed by their work effort, even though they were working their asses off. 

Certainly I expected that everyone would work till ten o’clock every night.  Even so, I’d get frustrated when people would be leaving the office at 6 p.m.  to get a drink with friends.  I would think “how the hell can they leave early when we have so much to do.”

Imagine that.  Going for a drink after work with some friends.

An entrepreneur was talking to me about an employee she was paying $30,000 per year. She said “I’m not sure she is right for the team.”  When I asked her why, she said “I was talking to her and she said that she needed to have her weekends.  She liked playing volleyball at the beach and she wanted to spend time with her boyfriend.  I’m not sure she is cut out for this.” 

We usually understand this when it comes to people that are tangentially involved in our business.  It also applies to your team.  We must have realistic expectations not only about their work effort but also about how much they care about all the things that run through our mind each day.

Money

Lack of attention to money used to drive me crazy.  Especially when it is your money or if you left a career or job with a regular paycheck, we are incredibly sensitive to money.  It’s not that your team is not, but they don’t have the same obsession with it as we do.

It drove me crazy when people going from New York to Philadelphia, Boston or Washington DC, would take the Acela instead of taking the standard train.  It would cost about another $100 to save thirty to forty-five minutes.  Don’t they know we are a startup?

We are always thinking about saving money. 

When we had a team travel to trade shows or to finalist or investor presentations, I wanted team members to share rooms together even though most of them were in their 40s.  In retrospect, not sure this was realistic when it comes to grown professions over the age of 35 but it was my perspective at the time.  When they questioned it, I questioned their dedication to what we were doing. 

Attention to Detail  

This also comes to life when it comes to attention to detail.  We are willing to leave no stone unturned, to proofread a document at midnight when we have already been working for fourteen hours and to redo a presentation that is wrong despite spending hours on it.

The sooner we accept that there is no one out there that cares as much as we do, the better off we will be.  It is our perspective that is off, not theirs.  This can be detrimental when team members and other resources that are working hard are criticized for not being committed.  Telling that to someone who has just worked a long day or a weekend is a great way to turn them into an ex-employee.

No one cares as much as you do. Don’t get frustrated with that. Be proud of it. It takes a true spirit to bring an idea to life.  Not everyone has what it takes to bring the energy to create something from nothing.   I always felt lucky not only that I stumbled on to something that might turn into a good business, but that I was working on my passion every day.

People will say to you, “Work is fine but it’s not like I wake up passionate about credit card marketing. I wish I woke up every day working on something I really believed in.” We are lucky to have found our idea or our vision.  We are lucky to have that glow in our eye. What goes with that is the reality that no one will care about it as much as you do.

Being an Entrepreneur Means Getting Better Each Day

The challenge of us entrepreneurs is to succeed in a hypercompetitive world. Hopefully these perspectives will help you a little in your entrepreneurial journey.