Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up - developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Every company, every boardroom in which I sit, has a plan, and they have objectives, goals, and a process. And to make it work, the pressure and incentive have to come from the top.
As a young analyst just out of Stanford business school in the 1960s, I got to really understand what growth was about. Back then, you had to ask a customer to pay some money. That was the most important thing in getting a company off the ground.
Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees.
I know all three facets of the business: the development side, the operations side, and I know how to borrow the money and how to put the deal together. If it was easy, everybody would do it.
The most common way to grow a business is by overseeing each and every aspect of the company - the 'ground up' method.
Building a company isn't that different from climbing a big mountain. You need people helping you traverse treacherous paths and to lift you up when you fall.
I'm building a large company.
For those working menial jobs or putting in 100-hour weeks for corporations, the lure of starting your own business can seem like a great way to get more flexibility, upside, and ownership.
I've been preparing to run a big company all my life.
There's this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it's done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.