REFLECTIONS ON BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR by Hugh Aaron A few months after starting my own Business, I discovered that an entrepreneur’s life is radically different from that of an ordinary mortal. Every act, every decision I made as an entrepreneur was rational, even when rational solutions weren’t called for—when dealing with people, for example. For another thing, I was keenly aware that the consequences of every decision would eventually be revealed with stunning clarity in a single composite figure: the bottom line. Third, I was fanatical about trying to direct the course of events toward specific business goals—an activity that was often fruitless. These entrepreneurial characteristics—the rationality, the profit figure as the measure of performance, and the relentless dedication to a single purpose—had profound effects on my physical and mental state and my relationship with my family. They ranged from stomach problems to anxiety attacks to divorce. Clearly, the entrepreneur’s life is an intense form of existence. As a novice businessman, I became convinced that mindless, entropic forces prevailed; their sole purpose was to undermine my attempts to keep the business in the black. Too many prospective customers refused to cooperate and do business with us. Those who did contested our prices. The competitors refused to steer clear of my customers. The vendors refused to budge on price and insisted on impossible thirty-day terms. Employees didn’t show up to service that emergency order or they quit just at the long-awaited moment of achieving peak job performance. It seemed like a conspiracy devised by the cruel, hostile world of free enterprise. The business was like a child that, left to its own devices, would damage itself. To survive, it had to be nurtured and guided by a doting parent: me. Until I took this point of view—that of the parent to the child—I was in constant turmoil, outraged by the people and events that weakened my company’s health. But like any neurotic parent, I too did things that had a deleterious effect on the enterprise. As with any parent-child relationship, the business mirrors the CEO’s personality: a neurotic parent is bound to spawn a neurotic child. One example of my inept parenting is typical. When the business was in its infancy, I was overprotective. Why not? Wasn’t it totally dependent on me? When it became an adolescent and acquired a number of employees, it began asserting itself and taking off in directions that weren’t always in its own best interests. For example, our receivables might be allowed to languish too long and cause a cash flow problem, or our equipment would continually break due to insufficient maintenance. Yet I refused to let go, to acknowledge that others could bring the operation under control. I was slow to delegate and let the employees do the day-to-day directing. My pride was another example of parental incompetence. As the “child” achieved a measure of success, I ignored caution and egged it on to expand as if there were no limits, as if the thriving economy would endure forever. Then a virus struck: a deep recession. After an operation, and the removal of some parts—without which death would have been certain—the child slowly regained its health and I found humility. Though the child grew into a confident adult, I reserved one aspect of control for myself: keeping it on track. Even in one’s personal life, staying on track is a lifelong pursuit. (Genius is the result of doing so better than anyone else.) In my pre-entrepreneurial days, I was easily distracted from whatever path I was on. But without a bottom line to reckon with, as in a business, staying on track was never a life-or-death matter. Every instance in which the business digressed, such as pursuing markets in which our expertise was limited or entering into unrelated fields, such as equipment that would enable our customers to dispense our plastic coloring products, the results never justified the time, energy, and money invested. Staying on track involved more than keeping an enterprise headed in a consistent direction. As in raising a child, a business must follow certain rules and procedures. Because people tend to break rules and abjure procedures, I soon became a law and order fanatic. But under this yoke, initiative and daring declined and we seemed to stagnate. Against my nature, I loosened up and allowed a little chaos. Clearly, staying on track was a balancing act. I told myself it was okay, even beneficial, to veer a little off center to make things exciting and keep everyone alert. The child/adult metaphor breaks down at a certain point in the life cycle of a business. An enterprise may grow old—even inefficient and senile—but the right doctor can restore it. I guided my business through infancy to comfortable old age, in which it could take life easy as it reaped the benefits of its twenty-year struggle. But I knew that it couldn’t rest for long. I knew that, unlike myself—in whom the aging process was irreversible—the business had the capacity to recapture the innovative surge of its middle years. So I sold my aged child and gave it an opportunity for renewal. A few years later, I learned that the business had given birth to a few satellites. Now in my mid-sixties, I’m a proud grandfather. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.