When I sold my first business, its turnover was a bit shy of $5 million a year. 20 years later, its new owners reported $450 million and change. Now it is part of Deutsche Post.
I have never kidded myself if that business had stayed in my hands it would have grown, if at all, far beyond the level to which I took it. In fact I hated the last couple of years before the sale, because I was being forced to spend too much time with accountants, who wanted me to think numbers instead of letting me focus on what we were actually doing.
There's a special irony in this, because I trained as a chartered accountant. But I absolutely hated it and resolved that whatever I did next, I was going to fly by the seat of my pants and not rely on anything I could learn from a book. I got away with it and I have had three successful businesses in my life, selling all of them not long after someone said "business plan" to me. Dealing with numbers, instead of just letting them happen, always seemed to take the fun out of whatever I was doing and get in the way of doing it well.
I'm not proud of all this: it's undoubtedly a weakness. But I had an instinctive grasp, that was right a lot more often than it was wrong, of what would make money. And not just for a concept, but for making it happen too. Even my approach to costing was cavalier to say the least: pricing to me was as much a part of an idea as the service or product itself, so prices just kind of "popped up" along with everything else. Stuck with them, as it were, I had to make sure that costs and volume were such that everything came out right in the end. Usually they did
