My second job out of college was my first startup - a third-party logistics provider. We handled warehousing and transportation and our clients included a truck transmission manufacturer and a retail framing company, both accounts I managed. We were a real startup, but we were owned by a Fortune 50 trucking company. I didn’t know much about startups but I was two years out of college, fresh out of a sales job and loved the heady excitement of figuring out how to do new things that always seemed to pop up in a startup.
After a couple years, my startup started dying. Several reasons really, but it mainly came down to an experienced management team (experienced in corporate America but not with startups) and a parent organization that ran out of funding (due to a Teamsters strike. Really, I’m not making this up). After growing the company to several million dollars in revenue and 150 employees, I rode the elevator down through five floors of layoffs to the bottom floor where there were only three employees left. Then we had a final layoff, sort of an escalator to the basement. Lessons learned - evaluate the senior leadership team, ensure the startup has adequate funding and don’t over-stay your welcome.
The layoff wasn’t a big a problem as I thought it would be. I was working again in four weeks for a new startup. But first, let’s backtrack a bit. My first job after school was selling long distance. Yes, back in the old days when we actually had long distance. Our CEO came to my city to meet us and speak one afternoon. During the Q&A, someone asked him about the future of the company. He started off by saying long distance would not exist in five years and a new technology called Personal Communications Services would be the new lifeblood of the company. There was an auction that summer that my company would win and build the company on this new technology.
Wow. What a blow. Long distance, the service that paid for my house and car, would not exist just one year after my new was paid off. Then another blow. My CEO’s prediction was wrong and we didn’t win the auction that summer. But another telecomm startup in my current city did. This new startup was funded by a big long distance company and three cable companies. I did my homework. Management team? Check. Funding? Check. Four weeks after losing my gig at the first startup, I was working at my second startup.
Now work was fun again. This company was growing, not shrinking. We hadn’t started launching markets yet, but we would soon. And then we couldn’t keep up with the demand. Traveling from city to city launching new markets was an adrenaline-fueled rush. This was not a job. It was a crusade. We were changing the world of telecomm. And our results showed it. We were the fastest startup to reach one billion dollars in sales.
And right when we were on top, the long distance partner bought out the cable partners. I thought we’d be alright. Then our rock star CEO resigned. I should have sold all my options. But I stuck it out for the next five years. It wasn’t a roller coaster, but more like a slow slide. It wasn’t all bad….they paid for grad school. With the craziness of startups, I never had time to go back for my MBA. But when the post-startup rush slowed down, I found myself accepted into a Top 25 business school. And my startup, now part of the big telecomm company, paid for the whole thing.
Two years later, fresh MBA in hand, I started looking again. Building a company was fun but being a small cog in a big machine was not. I decided to change industries to work in the outdoor industry, something I was passionate about as a hunter and fisherman. After two years of looking in the outdoor industry, I found a new company in the middle of my home state in the middle of a country.
My new company isn’t a startup….we’re over thirty years old. But in a lot of ways, we’re a 30-year-old startup. In the six years I’ve been there, we’ve met our shareholder requirements of double-digit growth each year. A lot of this growth is due to a great management team. Based on a challenge from our CEO, we applied for and received our state’s quality award three years ago and then received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award the next year. We’re still growing and it still feels like a startup, even though we really aren’t.
I think my best years are in front of me. I don’t know if I’ll do another startup, but I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned from my experience with them. Great management team? Check. Solid funding? Check. And a history of results.
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