I spoke with Melissa, an owner-operator out of Chicago today. She runs a management and events planning company for associations. She’s a 10,000 Small Business (10KSB) Alumni like me.
If you’re unfamiliar with 10KSB, it’s a small business accelerator funded by Goldman Sachs and operated by Babson University. It’s a three-to-six month program that provides education and access to capital and is organized around the participant creating a comprehensive growth plan.
She told me, “I went through 10KSB in 2013 and expected that my business would just take off after I created my growth plan. But actually, nothing much happened until 2019.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I had to sort of settle into all the ideas. Then in 2019 things seemed to catalyze and the business did take off. I’ve been busy ever since.”
When I look around my business, I see lots of room for improvement. We do many things very well, but there are missing people and systems that lack the level of sophistication that is needed to perform optimally. The needed changes aren’t conceptually complex and I understand them, but the actual execution of those changes is much trickier.
For example, we need an account manager. Pretty simple at the surface. But hiring the right account manager, at the right price, at the right time, and making sure that we see a return so that we can keep them around is more complex with lots of risks and downsides to figure out.
I suspect that the six years between when Melissa went through 10KSB and when she started to see growth were an incubation period. On the surface, not much was going on, but she was beginning to see her business and the opportunities in the market differently.
Often, the final ingredient after all the work and planning is time.
Patience, persistence, optimism.