INTRODUCTION
Weaving a Vision into a Tapestry of Heirloom Quality
In the early stages of their business’s development, entrepreneurs face a kaleidoscope of choices. Their product or service idea can take on a variety of forms. Their organizational structure is uncertain as they try to look into the future. They see a multitude of colorful patterns that seem to change with every rotational twist.
How can the entrepreneur select from all these “kaleidoscopic patterns” a design that can be woven into a meaningful tapestry that achieves lasting business success? More importantly, how does this creative design become a tapestry of heirloom quality that can continue to expand, evolve, and be sustainable throughout future generations?
Likewise during these early stages, most entrepreneurs are not thinking generationally. They are thinking about the coming weeks, the coming months, the coming year. They are thinking about how to complete the product or service development, how to reach customers, how to acquire funding, how to generate cash flow, and oftentimes how to achieve an exit.
The typical model presented to entrepreneurs as they visualize the path forward for their start-ups is funding from family and friends, seed funding from angel investors, surviving the so-called Valley of Death, followed by institutional funding from venture capitalists (an “A” round), growth, funding from private equity, and, ultimately, the exit: a liquidity event.
This exit comes in many forms: an IPO, a strategic acquisition by an industry leader, or a sale to another private equity firm.
But the seeds for building an enduring culture or multigenerational heritage are sown in the early years of the business, identifying and creating its own unique DNA. The decisions that entrepreneurs make during these early years, although they feel short term, will be the beginning of a set of business processes woven together to create an organizational future—if only for a few years—until a long-term vision is created.
My mother and father started our business in 1949 with two sewing machines in the basement of our home. Their first contract was sewing lace around baby doll diapers. My father’s entrepreneurial vision was simply to acquire enough “cut-and-sew” contracts to generate money to feed his family.
My parents’ longer-term vision was to build a family business where their five children could build their careers. My mother and father were children of the Depression. In their minds, the most valuable legacy parents could leave their children would be a job opportunity that grew into a stable, long-term career.
It was the summer of 1966. I was between my junior and senior years at Bowling Green State University. I convinced my father to allow me to go on a three-week college trip that would begin in Copenhagen, Denmark; take us to Helsinki, Finland; Leningrad and Moscow in Russia; Bucharest, Romania; Prague, Czechoslovakia; and then finish in Rome, Italy.
I was an excited, young, and naïve student who grew up in a village of four hundred in the middle of Amish country. I spent three years at a state college in northwestern Ohio. I was convinced that the Europeans we would meet on this trip would certainly envy us as Americans with all the opportunities that America had to offer.
That illusion was quickly dispelled.
Our first evening in Copenhagen, following dinner, four of us wandered through Tivoli Gardens—the city’s Central Park. We were fortunate to meet several Danish students and began talking with them. When we told them we were from America, I was surprised at their response.
“Well, how nice, but we certainly would not want to be Americans.”
end of excerpt
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The above excerpt is abridged from the introductory chapter of A Vibrant Vision.
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