| Monday, July 19, 2010

Working on your business systems is important, working out where you’re going wrong with your business and what you should be thinking about is important, and planning how to get from where you are to where you want to go is also important but where, exactly, are you trying to get to?

And are you really sure that you want to walk down that path in life? Or walk down it again but in a different way? And why do you want to build a business in the first place?

Out of necessity? Because you envision yourself as a big businessman? Because you want to channel your creative energies? Because you want to build up your net worth and secure your financial future?

I told you my cousin asked me if I wanted to create a company before we created Doctorlingua in 2007. Clearly, I had no idea what was really involved in undertaking such an adventure, nor was I totally convinced that it was actually what I wanted to do—but it seemed like the right thing to do, the next logical step.

Two years later, in 2009, I remember sitting at my desk wondering where it had all gone wrong and thinking about the future. And the one overriding question tumbling around inside my mind was: “Do you want to spend the next ten years of your life fighting this business, now that you know how it works and what it involves in reality, now you know how it doesn’t work?”

And do you have the resources and capacity left to even try?

I decided I didn’t at the time.

Doctorilngua functioned the way it did, in reality, of course, because we had built it to work that way, although looking back ‘built’ is probably a bit of an exaggeration.

We could have designed it to work in a different way, if we had thought about it more and known more about what types of things we were supposed to be thinking about.

I will design my next company in a different way.

But what do I want that company to look like? How big should it be? What exactly should its activities be? What type of value should it offer to its clients, employees and shareholders? How many employees and clients will there be?

“The true question is not how small a business should be but how big. How big can your business naturally become, with the operative word being naturally?”

Also, remember that your business is not your company.

My business—translation and language teaching—has been the same for the last seven years. The form my company has taken has changed over that time and will do so again.

The business could work at any level, if it’s properly organised, but the structure of the company could vary greatly.

It could continue on its current level as a well-organised self-employed freelancer; it could become a small 10-person local office or academy or a medium-sized company covering a whole city, structured as a limited company; you could even build a large public company spread across several regions.

Maybe, in fact, you could reach large company size in just the one physical place, depending on the structure you built and the demand generated for your services.

Doctorlingua was a small limited company which—if we’d done it properly—could easily have reached the healthy medium-sized company stage here in Murcia within five years.

And it’s your choice:

“It’s up to you to dictate your business’s rate of growth as best you can by understanding the key processes that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.”

How big do you want your company to be? What do you want it to look like in five or ten years time?