This week I’ve invited a handful of collaborators I enjoy and admire to write guest posts that fit the scope of this space: “the art & science of creative action.” Today's post comes from Richard Wilding. Richard is the founder and owner of WMW, a creative agency which likes to pick fights with complexity at work. He's just written the UK Government's narrative for tech founders to set up, scale up and stay in the UK.

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Thinking of starting a business?

 

Do you know the way to San Jose?

Fame and fortune is a magnet
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you're never alone
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away

-       Bacharach and David

 

I don’t want to start on a downer, I really don’t.

If you’d like to avoid hard truths about business start-ups, feel free to skip this post.

But.

If you are serious about starting a successful business, you do need to know up front that the odds are against you from the off.

According to the Office for National Statistics in the UK, only 42% of businesses make it through the first five years. And if you’re thinking, no matter because I’m starting it in the US, it’s the same story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Business Employment Dynamics says that 50% of US businesses fail in the first five years. Bloomberg don’t agree. They reckon it’s even worse. They reckon 80% of entrepreneurs who start businesses fail before two years are out.

I know.

It’s carnage out there for entrepreneurs. Dreams turn into dust and blow away.

When I started my business, I was aware that most businesses didn’t survive for long but that knowledge didn’t put me off. I was still determined to start it. Nothing was going to stop me starting it. My focus was on the start, not the next step nor the one after that. The mistake I made was thinking that sheer determination and a little bit of know-how would be enough when I reached those steps. I had literally no idea of the sacrifices I would need to make. Which meant that when difficulties happened, and happen they did, I wasn’t fully prepared for how to handle them. I wasn’t prepared because all the advice I had, had prepared me for scenarios which would never happen.

When you start a business, you’re told you have to do a business plan. What very few people will tell you, and what not a single person told me, was that before you do a business plan, you need to do a Me Plan. A business plan is a piece of necessary fiction for the bank or the investor or for 3 am when you can’t sleep, but the slightest breeze from the real world will blow it away and you’ll never see it again. A Me Plan, on the other hand, will be as valid on day one as it is on day 1,000 or even day 10,000.

A Me Plan

An oak grows 20m tall because it has roots that extend 20m in a radius from the original acorn. It’s what you can’t see that gives it its strength.

A Me Plan roots your business in who you are in your core. Unlike a business plan where you can literally make it all up because the future hasn’t happened yet, a Me Plan is based on what has happened to you and what you’ve made of it all. You don’t need to spend too long on it and the last thing you’ll want to do is some self-indulgent, introspective essay on the essentialness of yourself. A Me Plan can be scribbled on a piece of paper and you don’t need anyone else to see it. All you need apart from laptop/macbook/pen and paper is self-awareness and self-honesty.

So here goes.

A Me Plan consists of just three questions:

Who Am I?

What’s most important to me today?

What might be more important to me in five years’ time?

Who Am I?

Here’s one way to go about it as a short-cut: Jung’s Archetypes have been adopted by the advertising/marketing industry to point to essence of brands. So in this brand archetype wheel, Nike as a brand is a Hero brand. Nike is brave, not intimidating; confident, not boorish; inspiring and ambitious.

Is that you?

Or are you the Rebel?

Or the Sage?

Naturally, you’re none of these. Jung, I’m pretty sure, would turn in his grave if he knew what the mad men made of his work.

However you get to it – asking friends and family isn’t such a bad place to start – make an inventory of who you are in good weather and especially in stormy weather. Anyone can be at their best when the sun shines.

How do you handle minor set-backs?

How do you handle criticism?

How do you handle rejection?

How do you handle money problems?

How well do you take advice?

How good are you at staying focussed on the right thing at the right time?

How do you handle praise?

How do you handle success (how you handle success might the one thing that’ll put the spanner in your works)?

Above all, how well do you handle people?

‘Above all’ because without any doubt, overwhelmingly the biggest problems you will ever face in your business will be with people. Some people can be annoying and it’s the annoying ones who suck out your time. My first boss, a wonderful man called Peter Dolphin, gave me this advice: always be brave with people. If you aren’t – and many, many people if not most people aren’t - you’re going to have to learn how to be brave or face up to having to take the long way round so often you’ll wonder if you’ll ever get there.

Giovanni Agnelli, the one-time boss of Fiat, once said ‘Any Board should have an uneven number on it. And three is too many.’ The moral of that story being, set your company up the way that will give you either the most happiness or the least stress with regard to the people you work with.

 

What’s most important to me today?

Is it … money?

Or wanting to be spoken of in the same breath as Elon Musk?

Or, I don’t know, something Freudian like needing to prove something to a disapproving parent?

Or maybe, you genuinely want to put some good back into the world.

How will your business help you do what’s most important to you? And if it doesn’t help you, how will you react? Say your business starts well then begins to lose money and before you know it, you’ve lost more than you’ve earned. That could happen. How will you cope? What are you prepared to give up to keep the business safe, and flourishing?

Maybe what is most important to you is none of those items listed above, but the love of your partner, or your friends, or your family. Same question, though. When your business goes through stormy seas, and it will, how prepared are you to sacrifice the things you really value to keep it afloat? How will your partner, or friends, or family, help you and support you? You do actually need to know this stuff now, and have a plan for it. For all the unnumbered and undoubted joys and highs having your own business will give you, my god there’s going to be some lows.

What might be more important to me in five years’ time?

John Lennon sang ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’. What you value most today might not be the same as what you will value most half a decade from now.

One of the biggest things that could happen to you, perhaps the single biggest thing, is the birth of a child.

Or you get married.

Or divorced.

Or both.

Or you take on a house and a mortgage and an office and an employee and then hundreds of employees and you win clients and then lose clients and you have a bad litigation case against you (which you win) and the people you trusted most in the company leave to set up a rival and your partner tells you, I don’t see enough of you and, and, and

Anything that can happen.

Asking yourself what you most deeply hope for in life, what makes you happiest, is what needs to be in your Me Plan, kept in handy place and hopefully not referred to that often.

That’s it for the touchy-feely stuff.

Now it’s time to keep the bank manager or investor happy with a business plan.

And then, it’s time to set up the business which, essentially, is you going out of your way to pick a fight.

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