The question I get all the time: Why did you choose to start this business? Which can mean a lot of things, but in my case it means “Why is a 30-something guy who's never so much as mentioned quilting or knitting starting a textile company?" Which is a good question with an answer too complicated to give people in casual circumstances. My go-to is to tell people that I saw an opportunity and now I'm going after it. So here and now I can let you in on what I mean by that. Give you the inner workings of my mind for how I navigated the decision making and motivations that led me to traipsing back-alleys of Nepal and markets of Bangkok to start an import business in the textile industry.
Disclaimer: This ain't advice. You can truly never follow in someone's footsteps, so don't try. However, you can approach your own big decision with an examination of the values you hold, the place you currently inhabit in the world and an objective questioning of how to set things up in order to give you the best chance at getting what you want.
Situational: Room to move. Time to take risks.
I looked at what I did previously. Work closely with a long-time friend and an amazing team of people to take small company with a proven idea and turn it into an industry leading giant in about 5 years. So I had been part of taking an idea from 1 million to 50 million. I wanted to see if I could take an idea from 0$ up to a million. My place in life in a nutshell: Early thirties, un-married, no mortgage - I could afford to take risks that others can’t. Coming off a recent peak of professional success things were heavily in my favor to start something of my own. The numbers on entrepreneurs exiting a successful project show they have a higher probability of their next company also being a success (30% as opposed to 18%). This seemed to me to be situationally a prime opportunity for me to risk an experiment with my own company. Even if it fails and swallows up a couple years of my time and ten of thousands, it’s nothing that I couldn’t recover from within a few years.
Foundational: Elements this thing must have.
As a creature of habit, some elements of my new venture are going to mimic the last venture. But I made sure to take account of my own actions during my last venture as well as pay close attention to what happened within the company and whether I agreed with it or not. From Day 1 you are going to inhabit in some small way, every part of your business. So you'd better make sure you actually want to live there. Sure, things change and you will have to adapt or overcome. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be hopeful about you can set your business up to do just that.
This time I wanted to get my hands around something physical. Tactile. A product. Hobbyists and crafters put beauty and use-ability above all else. Fabrics like cotton or linen, yarns like wool or synthetics have to be something the crafter wants to look at AND wants to want to work with. One of the most important things in figuring out what you company delivers to it's customers is finding the places your company will not compromise. Finding materials my customers will want to use is a pretty clear hard edge. My last venture was started in the U.S., expanded to China and beyond. So this time I wanted to start where my roots are. I wanted to take what I had learned from wandering a foreign land and make something that was valuable to the people where I came from. Don't start over. Carry on.
Seeing no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I wanted to keep making headway on the professional fronts that I had opened while working in Asia. Improving on what I already knew I could do. Your company has to have areas where you play to your strengths. You can try to push everything uphill all the time, but I don’t advise it.
Starting a company where an eye for design was critical, and that exploited my familiarity with Asia was a unique ability that I knew I had to throw into the mix.
Psychological: Make sure the anchors that you set, are the right ones:
Taking some of my time off this year to give myself an unofficial minor in psychology I have come to understand more about what reward systems work within our brain. A large amount of the positive emotion you will encounter in life comes from the pursuit of goals. Not the attainment of those goals, because that is fleeting. But the actual pursuit of the goal itself and the ability to interpret whether you have made progress towards the goal or fallen off track. For me, it was critical to think about how I could setup these goals in order that they give whatever company I start, the best shot at surviving my own personal onslaught of fatigue, doubt and under appreciation that assuages any idea being birthed into existence.
Some of your goals should be practical. The nickel and dimes of how you are going to keep things running. Where is the opportunity that others aren’t seeing? How are you going to bridge that gap and create real value that you can bring to others.
Some of your goals should be scary. Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) often called mission or purpose. As a bit of a dreamer I realized that I was going to need things that tie my emotions to something bigger than myself. Something that mattered and that the success or failure of this business would effect. Something that cuts through the consistent hum of What you’re doing, and get to the Why.
So while working on building the everyday transactional value of an import company I have, tucked neatly into the back of my mind, the goal of working with small entrepreneur communities in developing nations to bring their products to a new market and co-create new opportunity. That idea to me means more than just shipping things from one place to another. Therefore, I feel I can move forward knowing why one of my feet is firmly planted in the terra-forma of What Are You Going To Do Next, and the other is in Where Are You Going With All This?
Anchor: Set.
How do you balance the practical and the fantastical? Clinical psychologist and professor at the U of Toronto Jordan Peterson says an earnest search for sustained positive emotion you should root yourself in pursuit of the hardest thing that you can aim at, that you have an actual shot of attaining. That might sound like a lot of grey area, but it’s not as much as you would think. It sets your limits within those things that would be legitimately challenging to attain, but within your own mind you can envision a future where you have leveraged your resources, connections and effort in order to attain that thing. From my other brief startup experiments this year it was clear once working at them for a short time that they did not offer this balance. Fixing the problem i perceived in the self-storage industry is interesting, but is at least a 10 million dollar problem to fix, which I do not have (no reasonable shot at attaining). Using carbon-offsets to neutralize emissions from output of Canadian companies is a billion dollar problem and one that I’m not personally particularly interested in (a hard thing that I’m not aiming at). So with the amount of resources that I had available to me, the idea of starting a company engaged in international trade, with products from a country with a limited local infrastructure based on a mission of doing good things in my hometown and returning benefit to those developing communities, was in my mind, the most challenging pursuit that I could set my mind to, that I had a reasonable chance to attain.
Anchor: Set.
I don't know about you, but to me that is an idea with substance. One worth thinking. One that will make you get up out of bed each day with your teeth bared. Ravenous in anticipation of what challenge is next in the pipeline. If you string together a thousand of those days...who knows what the hell you might be capable of.
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