3 Lessons I’ve Learned Along the Way

Being an entrepreneur is always complex—perhaps especially so when you’re working with search engine optimization and AdWords. External influences on the business are immense, as we’re constantly at the mercy of Google’s whims. For me, the key has always been to break things down into their components to understand what’s going on. The result, so far, has been three lessons.

If you’re stepping in as the CEO of a small company for the first time, or starting a brand-new one, I believe things usually go in one of two directions. Either you get stuck in every little detail, or you become completely detached from the business. Both are problematic, and both are natural reactions to a complex situation. To get a handle on it, you have to simplify—and I’ve chosen three areas to focus on that help me manage everything else. Enough preamble—here are the three lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur.

You Have to Find the Right People

Hiring the wrong person is essentially buying yourself, at a steep price, a one-way ticket to suffering. I’m not saying you should become paralyzed by this—you’ll have to hire if things go well. What I am saying is: invest a lot of time in it. Especially for small and growing companies like ours, this is incredibly important. A person who doesn’t fit and doesn’t perform is worse than not hiring anyone at all. I’m far from an expert in recruitment, so I won’t give any advice on how to go about it. Just be thorough, and make sure it’s the right person. And if it turns out not to be, make sure it’s a probationary period and end it as soon as possible. It’s bad for everyone involved when things drag on.

Your Team Is Your Tool

Once your company reaches a certain size, the team you lead becomes your tool. That’s the tool you use to solve problems. If your garbage trucks won’t start, your first instinct shouldn’t be to throw on overalls and start working on the engines. Your first instinct should be to use your team to solve it. If your news articles aren’t compelling enough, it’s not your job to rewrite all of them—you need to fix it using your team. This might sound either pompous or a bit odd, but the reason is simple: it’s the only sustainable way forward. If you grow from 5 to 20 employees, you can’t rewrite every article they produce, and you can’t make sure every vehicle in the fleet runs.

There’s No Such Thing as a Comfortable Pace

I often hear entrepreneurs or employees at growing companies talk about wanting to grow at a “reasonable pace” or “let things develop naturally.” To me, that’s just an excuse to avoid the hard work that growth demands. A steady rhythm is more comfortable than aggressive growth. But aggressive growth is constant strain, and many shy away from it. If you truly want to grow, there is no comfortable pace. There’s no time to slowly learn new skills, no time to let the business “coast,” and certainly no time to wait and see what happens.

If you want yourself, your company, and your employees to develop, you need to push forward. On all fronts. You need to work to improve quality or lower prices. You need to go after more and better clients. And you need to demand that your employees grow. The alternative is stagnation. You end up sitting at the top of a plateaued company, while competitors race past you, customers start to disappear, and you’re forced to lay off staff until you can barely make a living.

A Little Bonus Lesson

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a small bonus lesson I’ve learned. It doesn’t quite fit with the big three, so it floats freely at the end:
Don’t listen to too many advisors. Everyone wants to tell entrepreneurs how to run their business—most of them have no clue. When you come across a blog post like this one, make sure to draw your own conclusions. My opinions are no more valuable than yours.