Reflection: Sometimes it is Reasonable to Expect Failure Before you even Begin

Caption:

I am very sad whenever I listen to entrepreneurs talking in a cheerful tone. Business should be about mutation, and temporary growth, followed by culling of weaknesses. Too many people try to ignore these things. So I am being the change I wish to see in the world. :)

- Would you start a business expecting it to fail?

- Would you start, expecting the business to die, as long as you can make a profit?

- Would you start, expecting to make a profit, also expecting to hurt and maim other parties in the process?

- Actually, how many entrepreneurs expect to extract value without taking it away from someone else? Can we be honest about this? Not just saying, or even hoping that it is true, but being willing to accept based on evidence that we may be wrong, and profit may necessarily destroy another party's livelihood? Do you still dare to be a business operator? Every day I ask myself... and strangely, I remain willing...

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Essay:

I've been thinking about risk profiles, this week. For most of my life, people have called me cynical. Yet expecting a negative return on investment is fairly reasonable when one expects the environment as a whole to fail (if everyone is going to die, simply aim to die last). So I started Googling about the #etiology and #epidemiology of businesses, to stimulate my thoughts about this.

Most businesses are short-lived, taking profit early on and shutting down under unprofitable conditions. But when I started my first business, I thought it might be the case that I would be stuck in it, whether it would be profitable or not, for twenty to thirty years... since I had no greater ambitions for my life. We're currently in our fifth year, and just the other day a supportive shareholder said he had simply hoped that we lasted more than three years - if only all shareholders were so kindly, as I believe, most are incensed by my management tactics.

As I think about the numbers, I realise that most businesses are designed to have no positive impact on their ecosystem - most are designed to extract resources, then dump the ecosystem for another. Perhaps part of why we have survived four years is because we aren't designed to do that - quite the opposite, since we are cognizant that the majority of our competitors are designed that way, we simply park all our brand equity investments in longevity. Most wars are won by attrition, and our brand is not supposed to be an exception to this rule.

I never intended to go into business to change the world, to this day my primary motive is to make money. I believe neither in human nor animal rights in an absolute sense, while I think these concepts can be useful in a society as long as their definitions are clear and legally enforced. But in the business ecosystem, a business that seeks to skim profit from the universe of all ecosystems must be able to thrive across all ecosystems, and building such a business from scratch is not supposed to be easy. In fact, to make the most money, a business is compelled to aim to change the world... that becomes a means to delivering shareholder profit, not a moral ends in itself.

Reflection: Personal Brand x Corporate Brand

The past six months have been rather concerning to me. In the context of the project, now in its fifth year, I have spent this time thinking about our branding.

Issue 1: Our business strategy is to compete against an industry, not against individual firms in that industry. As a small, so-called 'independent', business, we leverage on exceptionally loud and cutting branding in rather textbook fashion. This has become more important over the years, as we have adapted to the internal weaknesses of:

Issue 2: cash crunch (also textbook),

Issue 3: management being banned from 'social media and other media outlets' (surprisingly un-textbook, given how by the book everything else is; but unsurprisingly, due to internal dispute). Then again, indie-brands are supposed to innovate by discovering myths which are non-canonical, or low-beta, I suppose, so maybe we are still rolling by the book.

One of the conversations that came up in 2018 or so, was a question from a friend about how much of the corporate brand is its own identity, and how much of the corporate brand is my own, as its primary operator.

In 2019, we acquired a weak staff member, and I directed the rest of the team to consolidate its efforts around repairing this member. Meanwhile, I did not apply any higher priorities to the team, as I evaluated that their primary competitive concern was to assimilate the new staff, or to eject them. So I had a bit of extra time this year to improve my own personal physiological, social, and home economic disciplines, and a bit more time to reflect on work without involving the rest of the team.

Partly, I thought about my friend's question. Here's what I think so far.

Our core (B2C) brand, and accents are:
- infrastructure as a service (high availability)
- function defines form (per price point: value-for-money over absolute quality)
- ultra-capitalism (to the point of dada)
- brutalist visual aesthetics (active un-foo-foo-ing)

Expressions of the above include:
- hashgame: #workharder #workharder247 #weworkharder #alwayson
- print copy: 'work, die, repeat', 'ordinary food/coffee/endings'

(The B2B brand and overall operations are mainly still under R&D, so I shall not comment on that here.)

With regards to my friend's question, I asked myself if I live differently from the brand. And the frank answer is, I think the brand is supposed to be meaner than I am. (Let's not associate being a nice person as being a good thing - I'd like to absolve myself of moral responsibility regarding normative comments on that aesthetic for the purpose of this discussion.) The corporate brand is supposed to be hyperbolic.

As I paid a bit more attention to my health and personal organisation over the past few months, I didn't ever feel that I was getting enough done at the office. I don't actually work very hard, in some months of the project - though in other months I might be working nearly all the time. So I think my personal brand is a lot more balanced (not-so-dada) in terms of messaging, than the corporate brand as I designed it. Moreover, while the corporate brand is very talky about being ordinary, I personally am generally talky about how weird I am... and about how weird my work is. So again, I think my own brand values diverge from those of the corporation as I have designed it.

Businesses are by definition vehicles. In this case, the vehicle has to drive more safely than I am used to running, but it is supposed to drive a lot faster.

Anyway, to cut this short, it's been six months of paying a bit more attention to my wellness, and I'm afraid that my corporation has suffered for it. So hopefully the gains I have made in shoring up my personal health and household, will now translate to more resources for me to funnel into the construction of office work over the next six months. I really do need to remind myself on a daily basis for a few weeks to #workharder.