Go Big or Bust

I had a meeting today in a part of town I hadn’t driven to in a very long time. Sitting at the stop light near my appointment I realized my stomach was in knots and I was breathing oddly. My visceral reaction to where I was had nothing to do with my upcoming appointment and everything to do with where I was. It had everything to do with being next door to a ‘big’ that I had thought was long since behind me.

Most small business owner’s dream of getting big and bigger; more sales, more employees, more overhead, more locations and more income. More and more. Dreaming is great. We all need to dream and visualize and have a concrete plan for the future. Unfortunately, many business owners dream and do and fly by the seat of their pants not realizing what may come with getting bigger. Where is the bigger plan? The bigger road map? The bigger energy? The bigger story?

My company got big. Really big. And while it did, I just flowed with the bigness of the day to day. While I saw a future, I didn’t take the time to put a road map on paper. I said over and over again that I could handle everything that came my way. As you now know, I owned a very large corporate catering company in Austin, Texas. My first kitchen was the ideal. Great size, perfect location, a layout that couldn’t be beat and an amazing atmosphere. This kitchen was stuffed to the gills and in hindsight, it was perfection and I should have never left it. But I got a whiff of BIG. A smell of ‘what if’ and before I knew it, I was jumping. No plan. No agenda. Just straight off the cliff. My ideal kitchen was 1400 square feet and before you could say, ‘fool’, I was building a 3600 square foot kitchen facility mid-town in a mall undergoing revitalization as a corporate facility. It was a stunning place with new and beautiful equipment, a beautiful conference/meeting room and a fresh clean big atmosphere. It was a dream to work out of even if it was out of the way and far away.

Before the story ends, I got even bigger and ultimately lost everything. The story is long and tough to hear but rewards with a happy ending.

One of the essential ingredients for any business is the plan. We can talk about ‘your’ time, what your dollars look like and which relationships you need to keep, but before the bottom line you must have a plan. It is great to have a vision and to believe that the universe will provide. But before the story ends, there needs to be a chart, a graph and drawing of the future.

My meeting went very well this morning and afterwards I drove slowly by the mall where my big kitchen used to be. I was amazingly calm as I accessed the face lift the place had gone through in the years since I had last been there. My back door was still there with its welcoming window and green awning. No signage so I couldn’t satisfy my curiosity over who was in ‘my’ beautiful space. All these years later, I have a sense of closure that I didn’t know I needed. I drove away with a satisfying sense of calm over the fact that I made it through my ‘big’, intact with plenty of lessons learned.

Do you have a road map to your BIG?