The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #79
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Walk but Never Run: Business Growth Takes Patience
- Converting PDF into XML: Possibilities Beyond Copy-Paste
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Walk but Never Run: Business Growth Takes Patience
Entrepreneurs should walk but never run. Growth takes patience, like farming and healing. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ambitious.
It’s good to be ambitious, set bold targets, and reach for the stars.
But farmers know you can’t grow a tree in a year. Farmers also know that growing a tree takes a lot of setbacks — dry years, thunderstorms, pests.
For some reason, entrepreneurs inspired by unicorn stories and other fantasy creatures forgot the logic of down-to-earth farmers.
You can look at a business from any angle, and you will realize it takes time to grow a great business – finding the right people, attracting sales, and scaling your tech.
This article is not about the hard facts of growing a business, but about the quiet, hidden factors that slow down business growth.
Let’s look into a couple of examples from my experience as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.
1. The Wrong People
When your business grows, you need to find the right people to support you on your mission. However, hiring is arguably the most difficult challenge for founders. Lots can go wrong, even if you hire diligently.
Speaking for myself, I have made a few bad hiring decisions during my career as an entrepreneur. However, most of those hiring decisions were wrong only retrospectively: Just like growing a tree quickly, it’s impossible to assess an employee’s suitability and performance in weeks or months. An employee’s true strengths and weaknesses become visible only in times of problems or crisis. Plus, not all employees are made to thrive in a fast-paced environment like a young company.
Letting go of employees is never easy, not even if their performance was unsatisfactory. But the difficult part starts once the employee has left your company: Even if it was you who decided to terminate an employee, filling the hole he or she left will take time. Just like healing a wound.
I had to let go of my CTO because he spread too much chaos in the development team. Cleaning up the chaos was a heavy-lift team effort, and it took us around one year to get back on track.
I also had to fire one of my co-founders due to attitude problems. Whilst the attitude problems were gone immediately, communicating to the rest of the team that certain attitudes are intolerable took time, too. And believe it or not, even a couple of years after the event, we still find some unpleasant legacy from that co-founder that we need to clean up. Healing wounds takes time and leaves scars; there is no fast track to overcoming a bad hiring decision.
2. Gaining Clarity
From the two bad hiring decisions mentioned above, quite a bit of the remaining work landed on my desk. I took back control over product decisions, and I also led the development team until we groomed a couple of good tech team leads from within.
Taking back control sounds glorious. But it isn’t. At the beginning, I had to go through product stories and development tickets over and over again, just to find out what’s going on and what the priorities are (or should be). With a 10-strong product and development team and 30-odd customers requesting features, that’s a very messy endeavour.
Nevertheless, two years after taking back control over product decisions, I have gained some level of clarity on technical dependencies, customer priorities, and new features that will lead us into the future.
What took me so long? I focused on solving the pressing problems first, making some further changes to the team organization. I worked with the reconfigured team to make product stories and development tickets more understandable to both customers and the development team. Only then could I start to cluster issues and look ahead. This took a few solemn trips to the mountains, where the awesome view undermined the clarity in my mind.
Conclusion
Whenever you think you’re not getting anywhere with growing your business, remember the last wound you had and how long it took to heal.
And just like when recovering from a wound, don’t run.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Converting PDF into XML: Possibilities Beyond Copy-Paste
Converting PDF into XML can be maddening. Here’s how to escape messy files and build structured, usable documents that actually work.
At Yonder, we specialize in digital documentation.
Awwww, digital documentation. How nerdy.
Perhaps, but it remains highly relevant in today’s world.
Because, in contrast to popular belief, most companies haven’t digitized their documentation yet. Seriously.
Think about it. Digital documentation started some 20 years ago with PDFs, which didn’t add much more value over paper documents other than eliminating their weight.
And that’s where many companies left the digitization journey. They still think they are on a full-digital track, but they are just administrators of huge piles of outdated and dumb PDF documents.
Forms of Digital Crap
Don’t believe me? Time for some real-life examples.
The biggest worry of our prospective customers is the amount of effort required to transform their legacy documents into our documentation software. This is because we strictly use the XML format for documents in our system. Importing structured documents such as XML from Airbus or Boeing is easy. Similarly, importing properly laid out Microsoft Word files is easy.
But what about all the unstructured PDF documents out there? Some of those documents are scanned paper. Some are in a two-column layout, and others have approval stamps from an authority. None of them have working links or a dynamically generated table of contents. All of these features are straightforward to handle in the XML world, but getting from PDF to XML is a cumbersome and laborious task. Often, it involves much more than just data transformation: It means making documentation user-centric, not just compliant.
Let’s increase the level of difficulty: Regulations. Most of our customers operate in regulated environments. As a consequence, they need reliable access to a wide range of regulations. But guess what? Most of those regulations are only available in PDF format, and many of them haven’t been updated for years. Converting regulations into a structured format is cumbersome and error-prone. Yet you need structured regulations if you want to properly link them to your internal documents and keep up with changed regulations.
Some of our competitors still only allow exports from their system in PDF format. It looks like they see it as a moat to defend against customer churn. We follow a different approach: Our customers can self-export both PDF and XML document formats. Because we believe that the future of digital documentation is structured. It’s the structure of their documentation that companies struggle with, not the content of the documentation.
Ways Out of The Trap
What can you do?
We advocate a three-fold approach: You need to combine human, deterministic, and statistical methods to properly structure documents.
Sounds difficult and technical? Let’s break it down.
Let’s start with the human element. When a human documentation specialist looks at a PDF document, it’s easy to determine whether the document is neat or messy. It’s also easy to spot where in the document the titles, the bullet point lists, and the images are. But it’s not so easy for humans to convert the PDF into XML — unless you love re-typing lengthy documents or have a fetish for the copy-paste function (disclaimer: our team has done both, due to lack of alternatives).
That’s where the deterministic element comes in. In plain terms, it means using a rules-based piece of software to help convert that PDF document into XML. Oftentimes, we call those software frameworks transformations. There is a plethora of frameworks out there that help you deal with the various degrees of messiness in PDF documents. But there is no one-size-fits-all, because there are so many different PDFs out there. That’s why the deterministic element doesn’t do the trick alone, and not even when you combine it with human experience.
Enter the statistical element. Although there are so many different PDFs out there, there are similarities between many PDF documents: Think of an authority issuing hundreds of different regulations, all published in the same PDF format. Once you know where the relevant elements are in one of those documents, you likely know where they are in all the other documents from that authority. AI models excel at such tasks.
Conclusion
It’s like in a team: Solutions are better if you combine different skills.
So what are you waiting for? Combine human, deterministic, and statistical methods to finally take the leap into the world of fully digital documentation.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔 around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
Do you like this perspective? Here’s what you can do next:
📌 Back the signal, not the noise — authentic stories by a person, not AI.
📌 Go deeper with my eBooks — practical guides for tough times.
📌 Browse the full collection — all my writing, in one place. No paywall. Ever.
