21/260 Risky business

When does experience become wisdom?

It’s tempting to think of business like a romantic comedy.

The spark of an idea lights up the minds of a small group of people. Let’s imagine that there’s the Idea Maker (I), The Doer (D), The Organiser (O), and The Negotiator (N).

All four get together over a drink in a dimly lit bar, where they’re all disenfranchised by their jobs. The protagonist, I, is a little bit in love with D, but D thinks that O and N are All That. When they clink glasses and pledge to get this business rocking, everyone is excited.

Once everything is registered and moving along, there aren’t any significant roadbumps. But then one day, I goes to D and presents all these incredible shiny things to her.

D loves the sparkly things, and thinks that they could probably achieve all of them. But when O hears about it, she gets a bit jealous. She loves the fact that D just gets shit done and that things always work out. So instead, she goes to N and has a bit of a bitch session. N, being the negotiator, says ‘hey man it can’t be that bad’.

So they chase the shiny things. They’ve got a good team and it isn’t a big deal.

They recruit more and more Ds and Os, and then one day N realises that they’ve said yes to a lot of things, and haven’t seen the dark side.

The dark side is in a proliferation of the wrong kind of systems. While the original I and D are off making sweet love in the corner, birthing more and more shiny things, the original purpose the business gets swallowed up in an ever-increasing web of complexity, obscuring everything.

Then, waking up one day, the four originals in the business realise they’re standing on a precipice. Everything is about to change.

Business isn’t all fun and love and sparkles. It’s often presented to us like it is. There is an overly romanticised view of startups in nearly all media, and ‘hustle’; of doing new things, of chasing our passions.

What you aren’t encouraged to see is the huge level of risk that it takes.

You might recall seeing data about the risk of failure in business. Very often, this data is related purely to the financial side of the business.

Again, it’s an over-simplified view.

When you’re at the helm of a business, you (and your business) are open to such an enormous number of risks:

• financial risks (from losing your runway to employees defrauding you)

• information risks (from loss to defamation)

• people risks (from not enough people, to the wrong type of people, whose bullying makes you ill)

• isolation-related risks (because it’s lonely sitting on top of a mountain)

• operational risks (from not being risk-minded).

A digital advertising pro I was speaking to just yesterday commented to me that it seems the biggest requirement in business is just grit.

He’s partly right. Every single day is another day in which you could give up.

Grit is massive, for founders. The biggest requirement for you if you’re not a founder is a fine grasp of risk, and a foundation of risk thinking in everything you do.

Don’t get to the precipice before you change. You’ll be far more adaptable when you retain your long view.

The past week has shown me how much I’ve learned about business in my life, even though I feel like I’m still on Day One. Some of the projects that the Pixie has been working on, which range from short-turnaround copy manufacturing at one end, to deep, analytical audit work at the other, have given me a real sense of accomplishment.

It’s satisfying, on the one hand.

It’s terrifying, on the other.

And it’s exciting to think about where the next wave might take us.