Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (27 page)

Think of it like crabs in a bucket. All the crabs know they are trapped, but they still will not let go of the claw of the one crab that is trying to escape. Eventually, the crab trying to escape either loses a claw or falls back into the bucket. You must have the courage to keep on walking away while accepting that not everyone is ready or happy for you to leave. Send them good wishes, and focus on what you are
for
. To enjoy a life of advancement, you must become independent of other people’s
good
opinion.

It also helps to remind yourself frequently that abundance is infinite. By wanting to make something of your life, you are not taking a larger slice of a finite pie. You are not depriving anyone else. Everything in the universe expands. Imagine how much money is in circulation in the world today compared to 100 years ago. Everything you create adds to the expansion. Adding to abundance is a natural law and free of any guilt.

O
N THE FLIGHT HOME
from Minnesota to Florida, which I took just hours after I had the idea for a great company of my own, I devoured a small book that discussed many of the reasons 50 percent of small companies fail within a few years. The most common cause seemed to be poor cash flow management. Having experienced such wastefulness of resources in my regular career up to then, this did not surprise me. My experience led me to believe in two maxims that had served me well:

Therefore, cash flow is a critical matter that can mean the difference between success and failure. Surveys of failed small businesses suggest up to 70 percent of closures are due to cash-flow
issues. Fundamentally, there might be nothing wrong with the company, but demands for payment for supplies and infrastructure costs usually come before revenues are received from customers. Most of us have experienced desperately awaiting payday so we can pay some bills and go grocery shopping. As humans, we can survive a few days without cash. A small business cannot because lenders and suppliers have little empathy about the reasons behind a shortfall of cash.

I have always thought of a company as a living entity and cash as the blood that circulates through it. If it stops flowing, then the company, like any living thing, will die . . . and quickly. With the importance of proper cash flow management in mind, I sketched out my idea to build America’s first completely outsourced, virtually run, pharmaceutical company. I still have the airline napkin with the original drawing.

Virtual infrastructure sounds like an oxymoron, but I had observed such wastefulness of human and monetary resources that I felt strongly there would be a competitive advantage to outsourcing. Reflecting on my career, I estimated more than half of my time had been spent in meeting rooms discussing things that had little to do with profit, performance, or customer satisfaction. I could debate as well as anyone in the room, but so little of it was constructive or beneficial.

Two recent egregious examples haunted me. The first was a company president’s obsession with weekly staff meetings, which he announced spontaneously whenever it suited him. A collector of antique keys and bells, he would walk through the corridor like the Pied Piper while clanging an old school bell to call the staff to follow him to the boardroom. I was cajoled into attending my first staff meeting the day I joined that company, and I watched in stunned silence as forty people crammed into the tight space to spend two hours discussing the style of chairs to buy for the new boardroom being constructed.

I vowed never to attend another meeting, and I tried hard to point out to the president the cost of his folly in employee-hour wages, as well as the disruption they caused. They continued the entire time I was at the company, but I refused to join them. My absences were noted and became a bone of contention between us.

The second extreme moment of madness came when I sat in a room with eight highly paid vice presidents and their CEO, his two personal assistants, and the human resources director to spend a whole afternoon discussing whether the previous day’s spotty attendance of employees during a storm could be taken as a “snow day” or had to be deducted as vacation. Everyone seemed to have a strong opinion on the matter and the room was split. I sat silently until the casting vote fell to me. I pointed out the folly and cost of the last few wasted hours. I would have caused less consternation if I had danced naked on the table.

Such waste of resources and energy in corporate America is commonplace, and I wanted no part of it for my own company. Perhaps because I was getting older, I had also noticed a shift in employee attitude from “what can I do for the company today” to “the company owes me and had better pay back or I am off elsewhere.” Half the time, I felt like a priest hearing confession as I wasted hours soothing the bruised egos of employees who felt they were underappreciated and underpaid. Then I would waste a whole month of potential productivity while I wrote and edited performance appraisal forms to keep the human resources department happy.

There is a certain level of madness in corporate America that everyone just accepts . . . because that is the way things are done. The beauty of reinventing oneself and starting a new company is that one can put aside all that nonsense.

Most companies used short-term contracts to hire extra help when they needed it. I had done this myself when launching
new products and was often a little embarrassed that the “add-on” company did a better job at their function than our own full-time departments. I noticed the employees of the outsourced company came in and got the job done while our own people spent half their time surfing the Internet, talking to friends on the phone, or hanging out at the coffee machine.

One of the ideas that popped into my head was that I could make the add-on companies my dedicated business functions. By doing it that way, I did not need to build infrastructure or hire employees, a major cash savings and assistance to cash flow.

I saw many advantages. Because those companies had their own hierarchy of employees and abundant human resource systems to manage them, I could be freed up to concentrate on actually building the company and making it profitable. Cash flow management would be critical in the early phase, and with this concept of fee-for-service, I could manage the add-on services as demand dictated. That way I would not be saddled with unneeded overhead or idle employees, and the company could evolve in an organic manner.

Additionally, a small business cannot get away with excusing poor quality in any function just because it is small or cash is tight. It will not be in business long, and customers have no obligation to be empathetic. These outsourced companies were up to date with all the latest regulations and had highly sophisticated customer service centers.

I imagined this “hub and spoke” model not just as a diagram on a napkin but spent time imagining it working in practice. At home, I played out conversations and scenarios in my head, then imagined the delighted faces of customers who were actually able to call and get an answer to their question from an expert without having to go through the hell of an auto-attendant system. I wanted the company to be expert in every function but without the cost of building and training to that standard. As
unconventional as it sounds, having a playful imagination is a critical part of the third step, and I imagined every part of the business model working together.

When I was sure about the model, I went into my office to write a new Intention for it. At the time, I had a list of ten Intentions that covered a variety of desires. Although exotic travel was still something that I enjoyed and wanted, I had added specific financial Intentions, as well as ones for personal growth, health, and lifestyle. Finally, at the bottom of my whiteboard was an Intention that had been there for several years that had to do with developing low-toxicity cancer treatments.

Although Audrey and most of the patients I came to care for when I worked in a hospital had handled their cancer with strength and stoicism, the side effects of the treatments robbed them of dignity. Sometimes I questioned which was worse, the disease or the treatment of it. I intended to do something about it, but I had not yet worked out what that was. It was simply a long-time desire that I had written and rewritten on my whiteboard more than a hundred times.

Then as I faced the excitement and nervousness of starting my first company, I added the new Intention:
I own a virtual pharmaceutical company that makes a positive difference in the lives of people suffering from rare diseases, and it is a huge success for everyone involved
.

There are many drugs that, in my opinion, are of dubious benefit to people’s health. I was only interested in drugs that truly made a positive difference. Because the small number of patients involved cannot justify a return on the costs of research and development, the larger pharmaceutical companies often ignore people with rare diseases. There is nothing wrong or evil in that situation. It is simply a fact of life because the large companies have to answer to shareholders, and shareholders want profits. I believed my outsourced business model would be ideal to serve people with rare diseases.

Additionally, I had worked for companies in which the employees rarely shared in the success they helped to create. I wanted a company that rewarded everyone who contributed to its success, whether it was as a consultant or an investor. If everyone can see that their efforts make a difference, then share in the material success of it, it means that the company as a whole will be pulling together in the right direction. It sounds obvious, but how many companies are there out there in which the staff have to take a pay cut or get laid off while the CEO earns a multi-million-dollar bonus?

In the biographies of self-made men and women, they were not shy about describing how they imagined success before it arrived. Following his childhood dream of drawing comic strips, Walt Disney described how he was advised by an editor in Kansas City to give up drawing. Working out of an old garage, he befriended a mouse and began drawing his new friend as a cartoon character. He imagined a place where families could have fun together, where adults could connect with their inner children without feeling self-conscious. He idled away hours imagining the feel, scents, and delights of his theme park. Walt Disney described imagination as the key factor to success. I did exactly the same with my first company.

In a similar way, I imagined every aspect of my company working perfectly. I imagined finding happy, smiling investors, as well as seeing the satisfied smiles on the faces of patients who would finally have reason to hope. I also imagined my own financial success as a result of building and then selling the company to a larger entity for a multi-million-dollar profit. Even before I had started the company, I had a clear exit strategy.

Finding outsourcing vendors willing to be part of the new concept was relatively easy. Each worked in a competitive environment, and they could easily see that if they did an excellent
job with a small company, it could become lucrative when the company grew. I was quick to point out all the household names that started as small, home-based businesses such as Microsoft, Apple, Mattel, and Hewlett-Packard. What better advertisement for the vendor than to be able to say one day, “We were there at the beginning and look where they are now.” Through those telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings, I helped every vendor imagine success by painting pictures in their minds. Soon this business model became
our
business model and it was an exciting new approach in an industry crying out for change. I thought the business model innovative enough to garner investor attention, and set about putting together a simple business plan and slide presentation. I was convinced that, with my attention to cash flow management, investors would love it. They did not.

I had no contacts in the venture capital field and had never been directly involved in raising money for a company. I had enjoyed a successful career but had no experience with actually running or starting a company. These were limitations I had to keep out of my mentality, although potential investors and bank managers were quick to point them out. I was frequently told by investors and the media that banks were not lending money to small businesses. “The capital markets have dried up” was the chant sung by everyone I approached.

I followed all the tips and techniques as outlined in Step Three. I imagined successful meetings with investors. I pictured signing on the dotted line of an asset purchase agreement. I pumped my fists at the thought of getting the investment I needed.

As I traveled across the country seeking start-up financing, our household funds were running low. The travel costs alone made a severe dent in our savings. We decided to sell the house we had purchased just seven months earlier. Upon hearing that,
everyone we knew tried to give us a hard time, but by then we had complete faith in our abilities to create whatever we desired and our mentality shields were firmly in place.

Within days, three couples made offers for our house, and a small bidding spree pushed the sale price to almost 20 percent higher than we had paid just a few months earlier. It was more than what the house was appraised at, but the final buyers lived on the same road and were buying it to move their parents closer. They were motivated to get it done quickly. We also cashed in our stocks and savings accounts.

Just as funds got scarily low, in April of 2002, the CEO of a company I had never heard of, one based in Seattle, called to ask if I was interested in coming to work for him. To this day, I have no idea how he got my contact details. When asked, he could not remember either. He attended a lot of scientific meetings and believed it must have been someone he met at one of the venues. I thanked him for his interest but explained I was starting my own company. He asked for a copy of the business plan.

A week later, he called to say he was intrigued by the business plan, and there might be a way to satisfy both our needs. He required someone with commercial experience to balance his executive team, which was made up mostly of scientists. If my business plan held up to scrutiny, his company might be able to invest in it and share the profits. It wasn’t exactly what I thought I needed, but I was not going to ignore synchronicity when it slapped me so hard in my face.