Published Work

Starting a Business Means You Have Less—Not More—Control

When I ask colleagues why they are starting a business, many say they want to have more control over their business life. They say they are sick of a boss telling them what to do and "controlling their life." They say they would be happier if they could be on their own and make their own decisions. As they say, "destiny would be in their hands".

Wrong. These people have never run their own business.

When you run your own company, you have a lot less control than you ever had working for someone else. You may even long for the days when you only had to worry about your boss! You have no control over all the things that influence your business success (namely your team, customers, vendors, systems and market timing).

Business life as an entrepreneur is like driving a car alone on a mountainous road and constantly bumping into the guard rails.

Bill Cusick at Oak Park, Ill.-based Vox says he constantly has to compromise the vision of his company to guarantee a certain revenue level. He compares his journey to surfing: "You can ride a wave in many different ways--aggressively, slashing back and forth and taking risks--or you can be more careful.

"Still, you can't change the wave itself. You can't control when the wave might swell or when it will break and crash down. It's the people who can read the wave (i.e. see how the world is changing and understand the outside forces at work) and react accordingly who will succeed."

Matt Hartzman at the Chicago-based Catalyst Consulting Group discusses when he was the CEO of a Web development business.

He laments that no matter how hard you try to control things, there is always a pain point somewhere in the business. He added: "When a customer wants it now, sometimes you just need to drop everything. Leading a small business is not like being a part of a large one. You need to wear a lot of different hats and not all of them fit that well."

Sean Lapp at LTW LLC tells the story of a large contract he won in 1995 and how he lost control in the process.

"I won a much-coveted contract with Pearson Publishing (the publisher of The Economist, EIU and CFO) to build their online venture. This was pre-Internet. Much to everyone's surprise, the deal was structured as a pure partnership. Revenues were split equally. They provided content and advertising. I provided the application development and hosting.

"After 14 months of development, it was go time. The first full-page ad layouts that I saw (to run in The Economist and CFO) gave me goose bumps. The agreement stipulated that I had to approve all ads. This was due to the need to ensure that any technical references made in the ads were correct. The modem set-up instructions were wrong. I made the corrections and forwarded the revisions to their vice president of marketing.

"Two days later, the person called and said that 2.6 million impressions of the ad had "flown." "What do mean flown? I didn't sign off on final copy." He responded: "I thought you'd be thrilled. You're the one who has been pushing so hard for release. I got your revisions and forwarded onto creative. We're done. CFO is live. Now let's just watch the accounts sign up." I asked if I could see a copy of the final ad. "No problem. I'll fax it over now."

"My stomach fell through the chair. It was wrong. The modem and connection instructions would result in a "fail message." I read and read again. I went to the machine and configured per their instructions. More failures. I raced to my technical team and asked if their was any way to get the ports to respond to these set-up instructions. First order of business was to alert Pearson as they're my partners and they need to know. So I called the vice president.

" "You?re kidding, right? Anyone trying to subscribe will be unable. They'll get a failure message. We at Pearson don't have failure messages. Do you know how valuable our image is? We publish The Economist, the most--" "I know but I can't fix it. That's why I needed to approve final copy. When exactly did the magazines get mailed? When will they be hitting the deck?" "Typically in about four days, so in about two days, the first subscribers will be receiving this edition. This is bad."

"He hung up. Meanwhile, the techs had nothing. Carolyn buzzed me and said it's so and so from Pearson for you. I didn't recognize the name but it sounded sort of familiar. "Sean." "Sean Lapp, this is Edward Hightower (name changed), CEO of Pearson. I understand you have a problem." Cutting it short, he stated that I had a problem and if the problem wasn't fixed and if just one Economist subscriber saw that message then my problems would be "biblical" in scope.

"We stayed up for almost two days straight. We went through every possible configuration. Literally 43 hours into the abyss, we had an idea. It worked. We created a net shell to make the hand shake and send the "new" configuration instructions. It wasn't pretty but it worked and all the ugliness was behind the curtain. Pearson, when informed, was curt. That's good. Let's hope you don't make that mistake again or we will have to reevaluate this venture."

In running a small business, you need to ask yourself whether you can handle the lack of control.

Do you like traveling the roller coaster up and down? If not, don't even get on the ride. No matter how hard you work, can you accept business outcomes even though they are well beyond your control? If you don't want to put your destiny at least partially in the hands of luck and fate, maybe it's time to move on to another adventure.