If you’ve been involved with construction, then you’ll know the long process and extreme effort that’s required to go from an empty plot of land to a towering skyscraper. It takes passion, dedication, knowledge, expertise, and a tiny bit of luck.
In many ways, we can compare the building of a skyscraper to the building of a business. There are several steps that need to be taken, a lot of planning, and your job doesn’t end even once the building is finished. You have to furnish it, maintain it, continue investing into it, advertise it and so forth.
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The Importance of a Solid Foundation
A skyscraper is a huge construction project. It towers over everything around it, takes months to build and furnish, and the slightest problem could cause it to collapse. When you consult a steel service center and tell them you’re going to build a skyscraper, they need to put extra work into forming the beams that are used to create a building because they know that if they produce a shoddy product, the whole building will fall over and it will be their fault.
Much like a business, a solid foundation needs to be laid in order to build success on top of it. For example, if your entire business is based around a fad that started in 2016, then what’s the point of building systems over it, hiring staff to nurture it, and spending millions on advertising it if it’s just a fad that could potentially fade away in 2017? Your foundation to that style of business is a trend, and trends can change in the most unexpected and unpredictable ways.
However, if the foundation of your business is something like providing chemicals for local factories, then you can be safe knowing that you have a solid business idea that is immune to trends and fads. A chemical plant produces a wide range of different items that are required by almost every industry. It could be cleaning products, flavourings or perfume scents—it’s a business that can provide for almost anything. One of the qualities of a successful business person is that they’re able to isolate ideas from trends. They don’t follow the flow of the market—they create their own stream of revenue.
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Maintaining The Building (Your Business)
Let’s imagine that your foundation was solid and you created a towering skyscraper of a company. It has a wide reach, it’s successful and you’re happy with the results. What now? Much like a building, you need to maintain it even after the construction has completed. You need to switch furniture inside, you need to keep the windows outside clean and you need to fix any issues that crop up.
The sign of a well-built skyscraper is the planning involved to get around potential issues. Think about those elevators on the side of buildings that allow cleaners to wipe down windows and scrape off bird droppings. Those are designed because the building designers know that there has to be a way to clean the outside of a skyscraper, not because someone thought about it afterwards.
This can also be applied to your business. You have to plan ahead for issues that might crop up in your business once it has grown. For example, if you want to cut startup costs you might neglect computer systems and buy cheap hardware or use paper documents, but what happens when your system grows too large for a small computer to handle? It’s better to invest now than to encounter problems later.