Don’t Rebuild The Company You Escaped
Photo by tsukiike kaoru
This piece continues the argument explored in What You Lost When You Left Corporate: once founders leave corporate structure behind, the challenge becomes deciding what to rebuild and how to keep necessary processes from hardening into the bureaucracy they escaped.
You finally left the safe confines of that demoralizing and distressing start-up, firm or corporate career to found your own business.
That business is now growing: clients, a team and profits.
But now…
What do you really want to build?
Not the jargon-y BUILD endlessly regurgitated by the Business Inspiration Industrial Complex. But a business built around your own foundational standards. Your own ethos, creativity and expectations. And maybe—just maybe—something with longevity, maybe legacy.
Or, I dunno, another crazy thought:
Maybe a family business?
I know, right? That’s a crazy idea in a world trapped in the endless, obsessive pursuit of the quickest, fastest, most lucrative selling-up to the highest bidder so you can finally enjoy a life of…
Guesting on podcasts produced by the Business Inspiration Industrial Complex.
But, for many, the foundation upon which your Standard is built is your…
There is no Great, Grand Playbook or Expert Framework that needs to be implemented.
It simply starts with…
You.
You know how the Work evolves from ideation and formulation into that dirty, messy middle of…
How it is Produced. How it is Performed…
Until—
It Is Completed.
To your…
Standard.
And that is what must eventually be conveyed to your…
People.
This is the part that is so often neglected, ignored, implied or considered a damn ol’ hindrance to the business’s potential for growth and market domination. It is also one of the scariest parts of growing and scaling a business. Because this is where the founder and owner can stop trusting their own ability, experience, intuition and revert to the Corporate Self.
They reach for the Great, Grand Playbook.
They call The Expert With The Framework.
Or now…
They sit down with a multitude of AI chatbots who—within a few personal prompts about the business, its processes, etc., etc.—are capable of reproducing all of that into a splendid, personalized set of Corporate SOPs, Playbooks and Frameworks that can be instantly exported to a PDF and uploaded to your business cloud for all onboarding needs.
Or!
Perhaps an entire section of the owner’s office wall devoted to shelving—shiver—Three Ring Binders filled with pages and pages of procedural doctrine for My Business LLC.
When Process Becomes The Point
And for the founder or owner who shivered at that last point, you may have suddenly realized:
You’re instituting the same old Corporate Bureaucracy you escaped.
And with that, The Standard has now become rote. Mechanical.
And often—like so much of the corporate bureaucracy we all experienced—disguised as legalistic entrapment:
“Sorry, Jim In Engineering. This Is The Fourth Time You Didn’t Follow Policy And Procedures 4.13-.016A. HR Has Instructed Me That We Begin A Process Of Separation.”
The People Doing The Work
But processes should be a conveyance of knowledge. Steps that preserve the evolution of the Work and protect the Standard. And they should evolve as the Work reveals inefficiencies, friction or unnecessary complications for the people actually performing it.
If Jim In Engineering is completing the Work…
But agonizing through the cumbersome, messy middle…
And finds an escape hatch that preserves The Standard…
Why is Jim being terminat—
Excuse me—
Separated?
Did he cause irreparable harm to the process? His fellow colleagues? The clients? Did he create a swarm of agents that somehow…
Burned everything to the ground?
No.
As the business scales…
The team grows and the founder increasingly finds themself having to lead rather than simply manage.
This is often where The Standard begins to drift away from the People actually performing the Work. Not intentionally, as some great pyre to the Gods Of Profit, but gradually.
The team knows the Process. They know the Procedure. They know the remaining series…
But do they still understand…
Why?
Do they still know what The Standard is? What needs to be preserved rather than reduced to…
Mechanical drudgery so the Work gets completed?
The Corporate Self
And if Jim In Engineering has created an effective, precise alteration to the process that not only preserves the original Standard but—hell—improves it…
Does the founder or owner respond with:
“Yes! Perfect! That Was Something I Never Thought Of!”
Or…
“Great, Jim. Nice Work. But…That’s Not The Way Things Are Done—Or Have Always Been—Here.”
That reactionary impulse is often something carried directly from the corporate career: The Processes And Procedures Were More Important Than The Quality Of The Work.
Yet…
There is an even more insidious impulse that many founders and owners may not immediately recognize.
They respond to Jim In Engineering’s new process with:
“Jim, That’s Actually Been In Development For Years. I Just Never Got Around To Implementing It. You Noticed What I Always Knew. Going Forward, I Want Every Job Performed Using That Process.”
At this juncture, many founders and owners—sometimes consciously, but often unconsciously—have built The Thing they always hated:
The Egotistical Corporate Manager—Executive—Founder devoted more to Hierarchical Bureaucracy and their own Achievement than to the People.
What Structure Is Actually For
At this point, the founder and owner has to reflect:
Have I corrupted this beautiful thing I built?
But there is often no immediate answer. Because for many founders and owners, what happened did not feel like corruption.
It felt…
Natural.
Evolutionary.
The business grew. More People became involved. Decisions increased greater consequence and…
Money.
With more money come greater responsibilities and greater consequences. And those responsibilities create the need for a certain…
Professionalism.
A Professionalism whose intention isn’t to subvert The Standard, The Processes or The People, but to give them structure.
Because structure looks like stability. Stability looks like maturity. Maturity looks like something capable of Growth.
I mean, look at those shelves filled with binders! That Cloud packed with AI-generated SOPs, Playbooks and Frameworks!
This is what a real business looks like, right?
And without Growth…
Well, the Business Inspiration Industrial Complex has already told you what happens next:
You fail.
But this is where reflection and balance need to become a practice for the founder and owner. Structure has to be instituted because you’re not operating an Anarcho-Communist-Syndicate Bookstore. Your business needs planning and accountability. Information needs proper, foundational channels and access points.
Oh!
And something else:
There need to be People who can convey The Standard so that knowledge becomes institutional memory.
Not…
Corporate Hierarchical Bullshit.
For each founder and owner, this will often be an individual process. Each carries their own ethos, standard and their own methodology for communication, hiring and culture. And over time, all of it should be revised and allowed to change as the business itself changes.
What Do You Really Want To Build?
And maybe that is where the real work of building begins.
Not with a Framework, Playbook and another 30 feet of shelving installed to accommodate another layer of Three Ring Binders documenting exactly how My Business LLC will operate until the end of time. But with the founder and owner periodically asking:
Does this still serve the Work?
Does this still serve the People doing the Work?
Does this still preserve The Standard?
And perhaps most importantly…
Does this still resemble the thing I actually wanted to build?
Because growth will change the business. Hiring new people who bring new ideas will change it. And Jim In Engineering will eventually find a better way to do something you once believed you had perfected.
That does not mean The Standard has been compromised. It means the Process has been revised by the knowledge gained from actually performing the Work. And as the business grows, those types of revisions have to remain possible. Processes need enough structure to preserve what matters without becoming so rigid that the knowledge, experience and judgment of the People performing the Work can no longer improve them.
There will still need to be accountability, planning, communication, documentation and all those other decidedly unsexy functions that allow a business to operate when it becomes larger than the founder.
But those things should support the business, not become the business.
Because maybe the goal was never simply to BUILD! SCALE! EXIT! SELL! then tour the podcast circuit explaining your Founder Journey while waiting for inspiration for your next endeavor.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with a business as legacy. Something that creates such a product, service, ethos and Standard that it transcends all the bullshit of our modern Business Industrial Complex and actually…
Transmits.
Not only from you—or maybe you and your co-founder—but to your child. Your nephew. Hell, maybe Jim In Engineering sticks around for fifteen years, eventually succeeds you and, one day, passes it on to his kid.
Because legacy isn’t preserving the founder forever: it is creating something with a Standard compelling enough that other People want to transmit it, too. Not because everyone is obligated to preserve exactly how you did things, but because there was something in The Standard worth receiving.
Worth evolving…
And worth transmitting again.
Crazy thought, right?
Building something worth transmitting takes more than growth:
It takes knowing what should change, what should remain, and what The Standard actually is.
If you’re trying to build the structure your business needs without recreating the bureaucracy you left behind…