It has been several months now since we started to inform our clients that we would be changing to a business owner type relationship and employing staff to do the day to day work. As you may have read in previous posts, most of our clients could not deal with either the increase in costs to market rate instead of the cheaper rate we were charging, or they could not deal with the change in trust situation and teething problems that come about with employing new people and creating a business.

However, we still had one very large client who seemed happy. However, yesterday we had a very good chat about progress and our client detailed very clearly that the trust relationship is with us as individuals and not as a company. They will be very interested in working with us once we have got our offering solid, but until then they will not be using our services other than offering us as much consultancy as we liked.

They did ask me to work for them full time which I politely declined.

They were very happy with our work, very happy with the work our employees have done, but as we have not got the full time client managers in place yet and don’t have the full company service yet in place, they will wait until we are ready.

We have not been able to fully implement the company as a solid entity mainly because we have still been finishing off consultancy work on a daily rate for this big client. There is therefore a gap in what we can offer as we switch from self employed to owners. I am not available for them at all hours as I previously was, and they now have to book my time rather than expecting it. We definitely need to employ someone who is available during business hours dedicated to a specific client.

This is the last big client that we have and it is a shame we will not be working with them for awhile.

(There is still some work for me to complete as a consultant and some from my hired contractors to finish but that should be complete in about 6 weeks).

This is an important realisation for me. I have built this business up from nothing for five years as a business where we work in the business. I have had to completely lose all of our clients in our efforts to move to a business ownership type relationship.

This is obviously worrying on one level, but refreshing on another. We will be able to completely start over again with our new plans. It is not for the feint hearted.

We are very nearly there now with finishing our business plans and have almost completed our new website and sales materials. We have a few more items to iron out, such as how we will employ a full time client manager, whether we look for a partner in the business or funding to cover his wages.

We should be ready to launch into the world in about 2 months. This will be after my son is born and we have had some time to be at home together.

This process of creative destruction is what Alan Greenspan talks about as being at the core of capitalism. It is what drives business forward and creates wealth. It also creates stress and anxiety and it is a balance of these two forces that either grow or stagnate countries and individuals. Winston Churchill said that an entrepreneur is defined as someone who goes from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm.

I don’t count our business as a failure in anyway, as it was exactly what is was designed to be, but if you apply this to creative destruction, I think Churchill’s observation  applies. An entrepreneur is someone who can consistently perform creative destruction and never lose enthusiasm.

The saga continues…