The road not taken
Whether you’re starting your own company or working for a boss, taking decisions is one of the most difficult part of the job. There are right and wrong decisions, something that makes some people doubt and make no decisions at all. Which is something I’ve always hated. Making a decision is about guts and doubting which path to choose has aways been a waist of time in my eyes. It’s like going from A to B through exploring C and D. This to me is taking the long road, I’ve always been a fan of the short one.
Taking the long road always was something I never really had the patients nor the stamina for. When I started my first company I consistantly took the short road. Everyone around me took the safe way, work for a boss and slowly climb up the ladder to a management position.
Deciding is nothing more dan commiting to the enevitable outcome.
I Immediately wanted to be my own boss. Doing that I took the shortest way possible to climb up to management: be the only one in the company. It was brutal hard work. Starting up a company that targeted the real-estate market right when It got the biggest hits, in Belgium that was the year 2012. Off course the bigger clients where not really that affected but the bigger clients were not my clients, I had just started.
If I look back at that time i realise I really should have done my homework better. Taking no pay and working insane hours I started to make a name for myself. Because I didn’t think to long about things, I made rapid snap decisions I produces faster and better than the competition. Slashing prices and delivering in less time than others. This rapidly led to more work and in a short periode I was making name, and money. But again this short path thinking made sure I got in to troubles when scaling and innovating. When vr hit the market I was again the first an fastest to the market. Investing money into the technology made sure I had to work even harder and cut pay… again. Because my clients where used to the service I provided I had to innovate after hours. Something that quickly led to 100+ hours of work a week. But because I’ve focused on the clients that didn’t have the money to spend on new technology the sale of the VR experiences didn’t go as I’ve planned. So following my previous business plan I’ve thought of ways to decrease the work that had to be put into the applications and with that decreasing the price. This off course had the same effect as before and rapidly I was getting more work again. If we skip 2 years ahead I’ve started up a new company, stopping the first one and focussing on a product based solution for the real estate market. My first company never really got to the point where I was making money and working regular hours, and with regular I mean 70 hours or less. So it was time to cut the losses. At the new company we started with 5 ,following my vision of doing things cheap, good and fast. But this time I have my counterpart, someone who can think about stuff for days at end without making a solid decision. That can be annoying too, but working together we make well thought through decisions by looking at pro’s and cons but when non business threatening decisions come up I’m always there to slash the decision time to a bare minimum and making rapid iterations to otherwise endless discussions. Taking a difficult decision can still be daunting but if you try seeing it from miles ahead you already know what the outcome will be. Disciding is then nothing more dan commiting to the enevitable outcome.
In retrospect I can see lots of times I should have taken the long road. But I’m happy I didn’t because It thought me some very valuable things and gave me the work ethic and manner of working that makes me efficient at my work. You can’t think to hard about every detail, at least not on the 90% of times where It’s just choosing between possibly right and the other right.
