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15-year overnight success
Everything worth doing takes a lot longer than you think
Rob Norris
August 06, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In partnership with
In partnership with
Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!
This week we dig into the entrepreneurial long march toward success.
We’re programmed to want everything now – but everything worth doing takes more time than that.
Stop ‘thinking about’ the business you’d like to start and get going.
Because it’s not going to happen overnight.
Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.
Table of Contents
Pull to Eject
Dopamine is a powerful drug.
Instant gratification is sold to us on everything from weight loss pills to politicians.
And we’ve been programmed to believe it.
Social media influencers with overnight success. New players with millions of likes. Magic pills that melt off the excess pounds.
It’s all propaganda … or bots.
The reality is that work worth doing – things that truly matter – take time.
Starting a business, consulting, writing a book, creating a podcast, side hustles – nothing good scales immediately.
It’s more like two steps forward and one step back.
Stops and starts
Pivots
Stupid mistakes
Adaptation
Struggle and success
Evolution of your idea
Survive and advance.
Entrepreneurship is March Madness 🏀 – everyday.
If you’re old enough, you remember John Houseman’s classic Smith Barney ads about making money the ‘old fashioned way.’
Clearly not instant gratification.
15 year overnight success
The Inc. article1 below claims 10 years, but my best business outcome took 15.
When we finally reached terms to sell our software/services company we got the 2 things every entrepreneur dreams about:
A high-multiple, strategic Fortune 500 acquirer
All employees kept their jobs with better pay/benefits
But it came with plenty of hard knocks.
We zigged and zagged for a decade selling our software to large corporations. But each sale required unique coding to work with their systems. Software integration with legacy systems is rarely ‘standardized.’
The results were a marquee client list with one-off installations. Almost every sale required additional headcount for support.
Programmers came on board excited to be part of a startup and left when their jobs became ‘support.’ Early 2000’s programmers had cooler opportunities every week. We kept some excellent developers for extended periods, but intellectual churn can be deadly.
Some large company sales took years to close. Onboarding new clients took months. Cash flow was jagged.
Founders went without pay. We leveraged our homes. We had to bring in investors and luckily found willing friends and family.
We needed to rewrite the entire application. And it was millions of lines of code.
One critical sale, allowed us to finally cross the bridge to create a repeatable, scalable solution.
And that took another 18 months.
But that 1 sale, flourished into a fantastic outcome with returns for investors, jobs for employees and some hard-earned cash for the founders.
Plus a lot of gratitude and some gray hair – 15 years in the making.
Am I trying to dissuade you from starting your new-new thing?
Absolutely not.
Just the opposite. The rewards of building something from scratch far outnumber the difficulties.
But this is a nudge to get going.
Because it’s not going to happen overnight. And not without a lot of trial and error.
In an uncertain business world, you know you can count on yourself.
And you don’t need all the trappings of corporate. One person can grow a fantastic business today.
Your knowledge. Effort. Consistency. Some good fortune. And just plain old-fashioned elbow grease.
Stand up the first domino. Don’t be a Wantrepreneur.
Now go launch something 🚀
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Old School Wisdom
Gary Keller adds to this week’s topic in his classic book, The One Thing:
"When you see someone who has a lot of knowledge, they learned it over time.
When you see someone who has a lot of skills, they developed them over time.
When you see someone who has done a lot, they accomplished it over time.
When you see someone who has a lot of money, they earned it over time."
The key is over time.
Free Knowledge
Hermès wasn’t an overnight success either. But today they are a six generation success story like no other.
Unlike every other luxury brand, Hermès:
Doesn’t increase supply to meet demand
Doesn’t loudly brand their products
Doesn’t do celebrity endorsements
Doesn’t even have a marketing department!
Hermès has completely reinvented itself at least three times in its 187-year history. Including most recently by the family’s current leaders, who responded to a 2010 takeover attempt by pursuing a radical strategy — scaling hand craftsmanship.
And in the process they turned the company from a sleepy, ~$10B family enterprise into a $200B market cap European giant.
This Acquired Pod is 4 hours long!
Dial it in for your next road trip. Or find yourself sitting in your car in the driveway unable to tear yourself away!
Recommendations
📰 Marketing Memos : Proven Marketing Tips for Founders
🧠 Seven Deadly Stupidities : This newsletter will help improve your decision making by removing bias, unnecessary information, and emotion from your process.
🌟 Creator Spotlight : Interviews and Creator Economy success stories every Friday.
💪 Dealroom : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business.
📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.
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