The Stories We Write

We all have a story. Companies do, too.

No matter how well or poorly we tell them as owners, operators, marketers, salespeople, there is a story being written.

I spent some time with the Way Back Machine over the weekend and came across some website images from the company whose story I have most contributed to and tried to tell during my career.

It was my family’s business, R.G. Brewton, Inc. We were an industrial distributor, who in its early days sold abrasive products to the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio, expanded into cutting tools in the 80s and 90s, and ultimately became an integrated supply company; managing industrial vending systems and selling manufacturers, across the automotive, defense, energy, medical, consumer goods, and aerospace sectors all of the things they needed to make what they make in the 2000s.

It was not glamorous or sexy.? It was as industrial and as B2B as it gets. We were passionate and we worked very, very hard. We competed strongly against the behemoths of our space, Grainger, Fastenal, MSC. We often won, we almost always renewed our contracts, and we grew into a "Big-Small-Company," stretching out across the Eastern and Mid-Western United States, pushing down South a bit, and into Mexico and Costa Rica.

It was fun. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. It was a team sport. And we built a strong group that collectively wrote a highly imperfect, but pretty great story. The company was sold in late 2021, all 61 employees remained intact, and many received promotions. It was a wonderful way to close the chapter.

A Contrarian Take

I am a voracious consumer of articles, books, interviews, and documentaries about business and its many stories. I attended Harvard when The Facebook was being built and launched. I consumed the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs as if it were a religious directive. I have stood in awe of the stories of scale, of stock price, of technological wonder and innovation that my lifetime has seen.

But I think all of the gloss, the perfectly tuned narratives, marketing campaigns, and the size of the wealth creation that has accompanied these seminal moments, has created a new generation of founders, small business owners, and would-be-entrepreneurs, with wildly misplaced expectations about success and the timelines appropriate to achieve their goals.

We are often terribly misguided about the stories we think we are writing or should tell. We want them to happen quickly, but we also want them to have great depth. It doesn't work that way. Jobs founded 苹果 in 1976, came back for his second act in 1997, released the iPod in 2001, and the iPhone in 2007. That's a 31-year time horizon.

While the story I read in a book in 2012 was mythological in its scope and grandeur, there is no way Jobs could have known what he was building as it was happening or how it would end. An extraordinary storyteller Isaacson, adapted the tale, its many inflection points, and what pieces to include and ignore, into a movie worthy, inspired classic. And while inspiration is good, I think it's also important to accept and engage the mundane realities of what we are often doing and trying to improve; we should embrace the stories we are given to tell in our lives and make them as whole, and real, and unique, and meaningful as possible. Don't try to tell another's story as your own.?

Just as the company name you choose holds little value until it is? imbued with the? grit, products, services, failures and successes of the founding years, the story often seems boring until you allow life the time to fill it with color.???

Business is messy. People, employees and teams are constantly changing, moving into focus and into productivity one week, and then out of focus and off the mark the next. As leaders, it becomes our job to direct this semi-controlled chaos. The markets we are in constantly change; a new purchasing manager looking to make their mark is put into place just as you enter into a contract renewal negotiation; the priority that enabled increased funding for your work the year before has now been altered and the customer comes to the table asking for cost savings and failing to mention the previously discussed expansion opportunity. Conversely, the same changes at a new account that you’re pursuing might open the door to a new contract, a new country within which to do business, the next phase of your growth, the next brightest part of your story.

But all of this is nearly impossible to predict. Markets and customers are generally in? flux. The best story I could often tell was about our team’s ability to adapt, to work through the difficult moments (there always seems to be more of those), to work as hard to serve the customer when we lost an account and were disengaging, as we did when we were implementing somewhere new.

So many of the answers I sought were found by focusing on how we did the most dissatisfying parts of our jobs well. These were the places where we built the tenacity required to create the next bright spot. And moving through these moments gracefully, keeping everyone feeling secured and energized, required patience and time. Lots of patience and lots of time. Years of work.

In my experience, growing a company requires the longest runway you can muster. The trip often feels like a “Choose Your Own Adventure.”? Luck and circumstance play a huge role, especially with the wins.

If I were in the early part of my career starting a business today, I would not be thinking about the stories of Jobs and Gates and Zuckerberg and Musk. I would not be thinking about how to grow to $10 million in sales, much less $100 million, and certainly not $1 billion (we'll leave my thoughts on the problem with billions for another day). I would focus on the first $1,000, $10,000, $100,000. I would focus on learning everything I could about the customers who I was beginning to serve. I would focus maniacally on my product or solution.

And I would hope for time. I would want to spend the early years (yes, years) taking small steps and patiently learning. And maybe, if I was lucky, eventually I would have something that could scale. One thing is for sure, if you do this, you'll have great stories to tell about what you learned and the team you built with. It would be a great way to write the first few chapters.

#familybusiness #strategy #inspiration #stories #entrepreneur