Starting a New Company - First You Pull A Lot of Weeds

Two weeks ago I incorporated again, this time as Anne Holland Ventures Inc. So my much-trumpeted "year off from business" lasted a little less than five months. Didn't even make it to the halfway mark. Phooey. I choose to believe if the weather had been suitable for gardening, my break would have lasted longer, but I'm probably fooling myself.

I also choose to believe that this time around I'll learn from my experiences and not do anything that causes undue stress, insane working hours, or more than a tiny handful of employees and contractors. Cross my fingers. Cross my fingers really, really hard.

First order of business is to decide what's the business? You know what happens when you lay out a new garden bed? Turn your head for a couple of weeks and suddenly it's coated with tons of baby weeds. The tough part can be telling which are the weeds and which are the seedlings you'd wanted there. Also, I have a soft spot for weeds. Often their flowers and foliage can be just as marvelous as the plants you officially planted.

When I announced I'd be going back into business pretty much the same thing happened. Phone calls, emails, Facebook notes and LinkedIn letters began pouring in from all sorts of people who had great ideas. I was so excited my head spun. Nothing's more fun than new growth, new adventures, new horizons. What should I do???? I wanted to do *everything*.

Luckily I did the intelligent thing. I went on vacation. OK, so I felt kind of silly sitting at a bar at St Pete Beach in Florida surrounded by hard working people who really deserved their vacations. They'd probably been in cubicles with a tropical screensaver glowing at them through the winter, giving them the strength to pull through. And there I was, fresh from five months of basically lounging on my velvet sofa surrounded by heaps of gardening catalogs. Needless to say I didn't get even a little drunk. I didn't feel like I'd earned it.

Instead I thought about the request Tom Thompson, former president of Phillips Business Information, had made to his leadership team one year in the mid-90s as we gathered to make our annual growth plan presentations. "Before you tell me what you're going to launch and build," he said, "first of all tell me what you're going to abandon."

What ideas should I focus on and which should I abandon, at least for now? What's a weed to be pulled and what's a seedling to be nurtured?

I figured it out, I hope. Then spent some time contacting a lot of people to say, "Thanks but no thanks for now." Like many entrepreneurs, I'm an idea person. This means I'm going to continue to have to do a lot of weeding. Anyone can have an idea. It's execution that counts. Now I have to settle down and focus. No new ideas. No more weeds.

What am I actually doing? I'm getting sites up and press releases out in the next few weeks and you'll see then. If you'd like to be on the list of people to get pinged as I start new stuff, go ahead and sign yourself up for email and/or the RSS feed for this blog. It's going to be a fun ride.