I had lunch yesterday with a business partner (we’ll call him Scott) and we got to discussing our businesses and how they are doing and all that ‘entrepreneurial type’ discussion. He owns a small 6-person audit firm and works mainly in the Texas region. So, in our discussion, I asked him how much he is looking into growing his business this year and he said he’s not. “Huh?!”, I said. He said actually over the past two years he’s been letting clients go. At one point, he had close to 50 clients his firm worked with but realized a couple of things:
- He wasn’t happy that he was never home.
- He was not seeing his 3 girls enough.
So, very simply, he decided to just stop growing and get back to a number (around 35 clients) where he could satisfy both those criteria. In the circles I’m in, you often hear and become excited to hear stories of meteoric rises, VC funded companies, and entrepreneurs building a company from nothing to IPO but, to me, this guy is just as much a superstar. It’s the lifestyle entrepreneurs that don’t get enough credit for building businesses just perfectly sized for them. I really respect that mentality. I’m still working on my business plan for my next business but I don’t know, maybe something small and big enough just for me is a good fit.
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John Gallagher
February 11th, 2010
“It’s the lifestyle entrepreneurs that don’t get enough credit for building businesses just perfectly sized for them.”
Never a truer word spoken. It really irritates me when highflying entrepreneurs that want to build a business worth hundreds of millions dollars look down on those who run lifestyle businesses as inferior to them.
My ultimate priority with my business is to give me a good quality of life. I don't really understand how making millions is any use if you're working every hour you have. If only money, fame and a large business is what you want, that lifestyle must suit you perfectly. If you actually want to do other stuff than run your business, I think it's a bad choice.
I'm tempted to say that neither option is inferior – they're just different. But I'm not sure that's the case. If you work 10+ hour days, I think there's something very unnatural about this. And I also think if you've got any other relationships in your life, you surely can't have much time for them. This has the potential to really wreck families and friendships, as well as being just plain unhealthy.
And this is all why I don't think I'd ever move to San Francisco, no matter how much I love Tech or how well my software product does. There more than anywhere else, it seems to be this myth that if you're building a software product you have to work all the hours that God sends to be worth anything.
The unhealthy working hours also ties to the frankly ludicrous investing situation still going on in Tech. If you've using big money from someone else, you've got lots of pressure to deliver. Working insane hours is an obvious way of showing them “Look, I'm serious about this.”
Anyway, thanks for an awesome post and I hope when I get my application done, I can look back and say I managed to do it without completely sacrificing my life. And hopefully it won't be a complete disaster because I didn't work 80 hours a week.
bradgarland
February 22nd, 2010
Thanks for the comment John. I would say that I do believe business, regardless of life-style of high-growth, are always in a state of growing or shrinking and with that said, things evolve or die.
It's the rare organization that can keep a consistent long term life-style business but those that do, I'm betting are the happiest people on the planet.