The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #141
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Entrepreneurs, Stop the Status Discussions and Go Build Things
- You Have to Invest Before You Earn, but Don’t Invest Too Early
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Entrepreneurs, Stop the Status Discussions and Go Build Things
Status discussions distract you from your main work as an entrepreneur. Plus, they can disgust people who could be your customers.
Entrepreneurs are hard-working people charting new waters, building new products, and driving progress.
That’s the ideal picture, but often, it’s a mirage. How often have you heard venerable entrepreneurs talk about status and prestige instead of their products and enterprises?
Here are some examples.
Cluster 1: The Airline Status Obsession
Travelling is a necessity in a sales role. If your company serves an international market, you’ll spend lots of time on planes. With that come lots of air miles and eventually, a frequent flyer status.
If you have a frequent flyer status, do you really need to talk about it? Would you ever talk about your supermarket loyalty card? Probably not. But for some reason, entrepreneurs associate their frequent flyer status with their prestige.
It’s not just entrepreneurs: Recently, I overheard a family discussion on a train. The parents told their children that they would fly business class on the short-haul flight to their holiday destination. There is nothing wrong with that, but why tell your kids in a public place instead of at the family table?
Yes, I also was a frequent flyer for many years. But I never talked about my frequent flyer status, and today, I am convinced the best frequent flyer status is not to have one at all. Because that means you don’t have to travel all the time.
Cluster 2: The Location Update Obsession
The location update obsession is closely related to the airline status obsession. Have you noticed how many people tell you where they are dialling in from at the start of a video call? Sometimes they don’t even use the virtual background and waste the first few minutes of the call explaining what you can see in their non-virtual background.
It’s the same when you try to find a slot for the next call. Instead of telling you when they are available, people tell you where they will be on the proposed date. I would understand this logic when we talk about a physical meeting, but for a video call?
When somebody asks me for a call on a day I will be out of the office, there are just two options: Either I accept the invitation and dial in from wherever I am, without a fancy background and without telling people where I am dialing in from. Or I tell people I won’t be available because I am traveling.
Conclusion
I am a doer. I thrive on getting things done and advancing my company. Status means nothing to me. Look at my worn clothes or my second-hand mid-market car.
Like social media, spending time and money on status is a waste and distracts from your main effort as an entrepreneur. Furthermore, status discussions disgust many people who could be your customers.
So, therefore, why not spend more of your time just doing things and advancing your business?
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
You Have to Invest Before You Earn, but Don’t Invest Too Early
What’s the right time to invest? In principle, investment comes before the benefits, but there are shades of grey.
When I was a kid, my parents constantly reminded me that work came before pleasure, and that I had to invest before I could earn.
In principle, this is still a valid standpoint for both private individuals and entrepreneurs. But as always, there are nuances between black and white.
Let’s examine those nuances.
Option 1: Invest before you earn
This is the classic approach for entrepreneurs. Either you have investors who fund your venture. They give you money upfront so you can build your business faster, reach profitability faster, and hopefully return a handsome profit when you sell the company a few years later. That’s what most entrepreneurs did in the boom years of the 2010s, when venture capital was abundant. However, building a business in times of crisis takes longer than anticipated. So you need a strategy for how to get out of investor funding before you take on the money.
If you’re uncomfortable with investor money, you can bootstrap your company. Bootstrapping means building a company completely without external funding. You still need to invest in your company, but you’re investing your own time and hard work instead of investors’ money. Very often, bootstrapping is less glamorous in the early stages than investor funding: Growth is slower because you can only spend money after you’ve earned it. Roles are less glamorous because you don’t have the money for accountants, customer service agents, or executive assistants.
Which way is better? It depends on you, your business, and the availability and conditions of investor money.
Option 2: Earn before you invest
Upfront payment is an alternative that is often overlooked: In many businesses, customers are willing to pay at least some of the charges upfront. At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, prospective clients often ask for in-country hosting, as data sovereignty is getting ever more important to our customers.
Recently, we had a prospective customer from the security sector asking for in-country hosting. We offered a price to set this up for them, but didn’t start setting up this solution before the contract was signed. And, of course, the payment schedule specifies an upfront payment for the in-country hosting setup.
Option 3: Muddle through
Switzerland, my home country, is a master of compromise. Entrepreneurial life is seldom black and white, and applying the concepts of compromise also works for building companies. Why not combine options 1 and 2? At Yonder, we both took investor funding and relied on upfront payment in the past, and it has served us well so far.
But irrespective of the approach you take to funding and growing your business, two fallacies loom.
Fallacy 1: Investing too early
Soon after we founded Yonder, a large deal got into our pipeline. The prospective customer always sent positive messages that the deal would go through very soon. In the end, it took five years to close it.
But during those five years, we started investing for this large deal too early. We could have saved lots of money and effort by delaying the investments.
In contrast, in the in-country hosting example cited above, we didn’t give in to the siren songs of early investment before the deal was done.
Fallacy 2: Investing too late
Investing too early is one thing, but investing too late is another. If you don’t prepare to handle a large deal or many small deals until they materialize, you risk losing your newly-won customers because your product is not up to its promises, or your team cannot handle all the customer requests within satisfactory times.
And in this case, any earlier investment was in vain.
About Me
I’m a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three — writing about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management from hard-won experience. No AI, no fluff, no promos. Just plain-text insights for people building and leading under pressure.
When I’m not solving problems, I find clarity in the mountains around Zermatt.
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