The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits

CHAPTER 8

MAINTAINING CONTROL OF YOUR GROWING BUSINESS

In the beginning, you do everything. You answer to no one. (That, after all, is one of the reasons you wanted to have your own business to begin with.) All of the decisions that need to be made—big and small—are made by you. And when you make the right ones, you find yourself in charge of what I refer to in my book Ready, Fire, Aim as a Stage Two business.

By turning yourself into a marketing genius and discovering your Optimum Selling Strategy (OSS), you’ve gotten your business from zero to about $1 million in sales. And now you’re ready to take it to the next level: $10 million in sales.

For that to happen, though, you have to come up with a constant stream of new product and marketing ideas. If you don’t, the company you worked so hard to get up and running will falter and die. Your lead product, which got you where you are, will exhaust itself. You will have fewer and fewer potential customers.

At this point, you can’t do everything yourself. You need help to continue to grow your business. In Chapter Five, I urged you to start looking for superstar employees even before you needed them. Well, now you need them. And a set of new skills comes into play—management skills.

Ideally, you’ll have superstars in charge of accounting, marketing, and operations. So now, in addition to continuing to be your company’s primary idea guy, you have to oversee what they’re doing.

In this chapter, let’s look at some of what you’ll be dealing ...