3 Years Ago Last Week I Started RMW Commerce
3 Years Ago Last Week I Started RMW Commerce
It's been a fun adventure that I continue to thoroughly enjoy. I am so grateful for the literally hundreds of people that helped me recently and long ago along my career. Here are a few notes from the journey:
- I was willing to go without any income for 2 years to make this work. Although perhaps very conservative, I didn't know what to expect. I still think this was a good call.
- I thought it would take me about 6 months to find my first client. Ultimately it took me about 3, but the first year was primarily networking just figuring out who I could help. The jobs were not large at all.
which brings me to....
- The first job of any business is to identify your target customers. Your second job is to identify how to serve them. Only after 6 months of relentless networking did I start to identify the types of businesses I could help consistently. -
After years working in either VC-backed startups (some of which became big!) and Fortune 500 companies, I wasn't sure what it would be like to own my own business. More and more, however, I find that owning a small business is one of the best decisions I ever made.
- Everyone told me it would be lonely, but I really never have felt lonely; part of that is actively cultivating a community of industry peers and colleagues.
- Having been a CEO before was certainly helpful. It just brings into focus how much I didn't know the first time around.
I knew having a great management team was important. However, the first time I grossly underestimated my need to be involved in Marketing. I did not want to make that same mistake again, because in my case now I'm not spending "other people's money" (i.e. VC) for marketing.
- Which reminds me. From the beginning, I never wanted to be a "freelancer". I wanted to run my own consulting firm that had the ability to be profitable and grow, because I was able to generate my own business. Year 3 that became possible and made my first hire in January.
- Here's the fun part of consulting for me. As I got later in career, with larger teams, I found that there were only 2-3 truly major decisions I had to make a year in order to set up a business for success. The rest were more minor and could be corrected or adjusted as the business went along.
As a consultant, those major decisions are why I exist. You want someone to help you with those decisions you "can't miss" on. This means the time I spend helping businesses make serious decisions has increased my own capacity for high-quality decisions.
