Life after IT

Every now and then I have what I like to call existential crisis conversations with my partners: I don’t know what I’m going to do next?!?!

And to an extent, I understand why some people get into this frenzy – you’re being fed a steady diet of “what’s next” usually by people who flame out and are back at doing the exact same thing a year later. Folks… I’ll say this slowly: that’s not success. For every guy that loads up on debt, gets lucky, sells his business and makes a killing there are millions of those that don’t. And like I said, if that were a winning strategy those folks would be out on a yacht, not in a job. Or worse, same or lower job.

So now that we’ve clarified that bit of fantasy..

Success in IT business is no different than success in any other business – you learn to benefit from change, you learn how to hire and train people to manage a business and you pursue the next idea.

Not all ideas will be winners.

But once you know how to build, manage and scale a winning idea you start to diversify, you start to invest and you begin to invest in ideas and people – not in the process and perfection. I’ve seen so many people fail trying to be perfect operators of a business and end up failing to deal with the change.

This is why it hurts me so much when I see CEOs of companies out going to trade shows that double down on sales, process and marketing. No. No. No. No. You’ve already proven you know how to sell, market and implement stuff enough that someone paid you to get you to the point of having employees and enough time away from clients to attend that show – now is not the time to invest in yourself – unless you intend to never get ahead. This is where you invest in your people, send them to these conferences, give them ownership of tasks, projects and services. It’s hard to give up being a control freak but nobody is coming to take away the CEO job – so move on.

So the answer – what are you doing next? First, what else are you doing? What sorts of investments do you have? What other side businesses do you have? What does your portfolio look like? You can run more than one business effectively at a time – and if you can’t then you have the wrong people working for you. If you can’t trust your team then you need to work on that first.

Perfection is not the be all end all of business. Selling your business is not the goal. Entrepreneurship isn’t about finding a greater fool (because if you’re selling you’re admitting you don’t know how to have it make any more profits than it’s currently making) it’s about creating multiple profit streams.