Self-Employed by Joel Comm

Author:Joel Comm [Joel Comm & John Rampton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

24

You Want To Be The Captain Not The Admiral

In 1917, with the First World War still raging, carmaker Rolls-Royce found itself under pressure to merge with the armaments company Vickers. The board asked Henry Royce, the engineer who had co-founded the company, for his opinion about the two firms combining. After considering in his reply the state of the luxury car market in the post-war years and describing the benefits of the merger for “economy of selling, manufacture and technical management,” Royce described his own preference. “From a personal point of view, I prefer to be absolute boss over my own department (even if it was extremely small) rather than to be associated with a much larger technical department over which I had only joint control,” he wrote.

For Royce, control was everything. He insisted on seeing every design drawn up by the company’s engineers and draughtsmen. (A draughtsmen is more than a draftsman; they are qualified to draw mechanical drawings in differing detailed scales from the first screw to the last bolt—in precise order of usability.) Royce had to see every piece of the item being built and even tried to return to the factory immediately after surgery when he had been given just a few days to live.

It’s a preference that every entrepreneur understands. Every business starts as an idea in an entrepreneur’s mind, a vision of a product and a company that, with the right skill, determination and hard work can become real.

When it does become real, beating all the doubters who said it couldn’t happen and all the critics who predicted failure, there are always two reactions.

The first is a boost in confidence. The entrepreneur was the only one who believed not just in their vision but in their ability to make that vision real. They’ve been proved right. If they ever had any doubts before, a look at the product and the sales figures goes a long way to removing any doubts that remain.

The other reaction is to then believe that only they can continue to make that vision happen. Only they can approve the design. Only they can develop the marketing strategy. Only they can choose the company’s message and its branding. Only they can set not just the company’s direction but oversee the work of its engineers and its managers and the rest of its staff.

Having built success with their own hands, they believe that only with their hands on the product can the company continue to produce that success.

They’re not always right. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Noam Wasserman described how founder-CEOs begin by wanting both wealth and power. They want their company to be worth billions and they want to continue to control every aspect of it.

In the early days of the company, those two choices are rarely in conflict. Before the product ships, the company has little money and is small enough to be easily managed. But once the product is out of the door and the firm starts to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.