Anything You Want

Make it anything you want

After  your  business  has  been  up  and  running  a  while,  you'l  hit  an  interesting

crossroads.

Everyone  assumes  that  as  the  owner  of  the  company,  you'l  be  the  traditional

CEO, having high-powered lunches with other high-powered CEOs and doing al

the big business deals.

But  what  if  you  don't  like  doing  that?  What  if  what  you  love  the  most  is  the

solitude of the craft? Or talking to customers?

Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be.

Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let him do

it.

For me, I loved sitting alone and programming, writing, planning, and inventing.

Thinking of ideas and making them happen. This makes me happy, not business

deals or management. So I found someone who liked doing business deals and

put him in charge of al that.

If you do this, you'l encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who

cares?  You  can't  just  live  someone  else's  expectation  of  a  traditional  business.

You  have  to  just  do  whatever  you  love  the  most,  or  you'l  lose  interest  in  the

whole thing. On a similar note, people also assume that you want to be big big

big—as big as can be. But do you, real y?

Huge growth means lots of meetings, investors, bankers, media, and answering

to others. It's quite far from the real core of the business.

Happiness is the real reason you're doing anything, right? Even if you say it's for

the money, the money is just a means to happiness, right? But what if it's proven

that  after  a  certain  point,  money  doesn't  create  any  happiness  at  al  ,  but  only

headaches? You may be much happier as a $1

mil ion business than a $1 bil ion business.

Funny thing is, I didn't want CD Baby to grow at al . Even from the start, I didn't

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want this website hobby to take away from my career as a musician, but it did. I

didn't want it to have more than a couple employees or outgrow my house, but it

did. When I had twenty employees, I vowed to keep it that smal , but customer

demand kept growing, and I had to keep the customers happy. When I had fifty

employees, I swore that was enough, and we needed to curb this growth, but the

business kept growing.

When people would ask, “What are you doing to grow your company?” I'd say,

“Nothing! I'm trying to get it to stop growing! I don't like this. It's too big.”

They thought that was the weirdest thing. Doesn't every business want to be as

big as possible?

No. Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don't forget it.