My experience in for parts: Motivation, Partners, Planning and Starting:
Four people doing the planning together is nowhere near as easy as it sounds. We worked on the business purpose and business plan. We discussed the values of our new enterprise.
Should we rely more on freelance workers or employees? Will we have our own office from the outset? Should we have our own assistant
Who do we want to have as customers? What are the areas we are most competent in and what will be required from us in the future?
here do we get our turnover and how are we going to diversify? Do we have to specialize? What price per hour can we, as newcomers, achieve, how many hours can we pitch?
A lot of “dry practice” went on and plenty of “theory” was discussed. We did a lot of writing down and calculating.
The budgets and calculated losses or gains changed all the time. If powerpoint or excel had existed at the time, I would doubtless have gone crazy.
However, there were also critical issues far outside of what was strictly business-related:
What about our statutes? How many degrees of freedom should we assign to the partners? Should the stock be subject to sales restrictions? Should there be special votes or minority veto rights? These are all issues you could have endless (and useless) discussions about.
Our meetings got longer and longer and the results more and more dissatisfactory. And time went by. We met each Friday night and discussed what to do next. The meetings got longer and longer. Some issues had caused very emotional comments. It was not a very nice communication experience.
It has not happened often that I made the experience of persons with very similar ideas of life had such differing opinions on what risks should be taken. The need for safety clauses written down in the contract and security of several parties involved were miles apart. Not to mention how much irrationality can occasionally erupt.
Thus, what was bound to happen did happen: after a little more than half a year of intense communication and hard work, the project failed. Two of the four parties had quitted. The only one who stayed on was Wolf. It is nice to have at least one of three left.
Die beiden anderen haben dann genau 15 Monate später auch zu zweit ein erfolgreiches Unternehmen gegründet. So war auch für die beiden zumindest die mühsame Vorbereitungsarbeit nicht wertlos.
There was an abundance of business plans and calculations. Now Wolf and I wanted to take the risk and try it in reality. On April, 1st, 1984, InterFace Connection GmbH was definitely to start its work.
RMD
(Translated by EG
P.S. The three pictures show cloudy skies while we were crossing the Peleponnes at Porto Ageranos from north to south.
Loading ...