Entrepreneurial Log - Month 23

A sudden gust of wind blows the menacing dark clouds away, revealing the splendour of the sun, leaving the child in awe. The glorious sun was always there, the clouds a mere illusion that tricked the child’s mind.

The daily hustle externally and internally is now giving way to a new phase of team building, focused efforts, and systemising the business gradually.

The key points for reflection at this time are:

1) Formation of new habits and systems

Goals and visions are nice and inspiring, but they need to be supported by the stability and force of habits and systems.

The habits and systems I have been used to in the hustling phase, may be unsuitable to this new phase. The theme of the previous stage was scattering, diversification and agility for regular pivots. This worked very well in the phase where I was discovering the footing for the business, testing out various ideas, partnerships, verticals, approaches and geographies.

I admit, I truly enjoyed these care-free days, but they are coming to an end.

The new theme is one of balance, focused energies, strategic incursions and partnerships, and sustained growth. Anchor clientele and partnerships have been established, and these need to be nurtured as they form the lifeblood of the business. Time, attention and resources need to be devoted to them.

Of course, the search for growth is an essential aspect of the business, but it is also time to systemise it. Plenty of data points have been gathered (in my mind) in the past 1.5 years in various verticals, and geographies - it's time to write it down the observations, the successes, the (many) "failures", the potential, and analyse the patterns. From there, key focus areas are to be identified, carefully separating my "desires" from the best routes visible for the business.

2) Shifting of the identity of Bayes from “I” to “We”

Bayes has been so far driven from strategies and visions from my mind (mainly). Now key senior team members, especially those vested with a long term vision of Bayes have started gathering. The vision, values, culture etc needs to be one that is collective, and perhaps we need to revisit this, and align it with the core team members who are gathering (perhaps after giving them a little time to settle).

The core team will drive the identity, behaviours and growth of the business for a long time to come. I'm confident in the team that is gathering, so I can allow myself to let go of the need to control all of these things - and see the magic the transpires.

My role as a leader is to shift to be a shepherd, a navigator, or a guide...

3) What is success? What is too much success?

I'm fortunate to walk down a path that has so many other travellers of various types in various countries. Interestingly, the greatest danger in this type of business is not too little success, but rather too much success that the business is not ready to handle.

Yes, there are plenty of examples where too much of clients and rapid growth leads to a detrimental situation for a business that was not built for that space.

There are plenty of success stories of various types - solopreneur consultants, small-team consultants, teams of 10-15, teams of 20-25, and those that grow larger. Each of these have their own ways of operating, their own benefits, costs and risks. Many of them consciously decide to stay within a certain category, and now I begin to understand why.

There are reasons why each of these business types work, and they are different to each other. I need to revisit the reasons why I started this path of entrepreneurship (my personal reasons), the revised vision, values and culture of Bayes as per my core senior team, conduct a deeper analysis of each type of business, and see where the pieces fit together.