What you need to start a business that lasts is a persistence to avoid living like a Fred Flintstone. Remember him?
Back between 1960 and 1966 the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) launched a sitcom starring this animated cartoon character, his middle-class family (wife Wilma and daughter Pebbles) and his middle-class neighbors Barney and Betty Rubble with their herculean little boy Bam-Bam. All of them lived in a middle-class town of Bedrock, USA. Fred worked in construction.
Greatly influenced by the 1954-56 hit TV show The Honeymooners, the Flintstones came to represent mainstream America. The show played during prime-time hour, becoming the longest running animated situation comedy filling that time slot. Not until the 1990’s did another animated family – the Simpsons – arrived to match the Flintstones. Not unlike the Simpsons, by targeting the young with its cartoon format, The Flintstones helped influence an entire generation about the American Way of Life, family and community relations.
What do you see Fred do at every start of the show, horns blaring, bare feet spinning down toward the exit door?
Does this picture ring a bell?
The guy is clocking out and racing to freedom. And freedom looked like this back then. Not that Fred was a loser. Not at all! We’re talking about a whole perspective on life here. And to give a frame of reference to this mid 20th-Century perspective, consider what copywriter Bob Bly had to say about it.
My dad died 15 years ago.
He was a great father … and we were extremely close.
I admired how Dad, growing up in the Great Depression, lifted himself up from poverty to a comfortable middle class existence.
I knew we didn’t have as much money as a lot of families. But we always had clothes, shelter, and never missed a meal.
To achieve this comfortable existence, my father made the ultimate sacrifice:
He worked for more than 40 years at a job he did not like (as an insurance agent). Dad found his happiness in his family, his friends, and his hobbies (he played poker, bowled, and collected coins).
My own father was similar. He also lived through the Great Depression. He died 10 years ago. He was into simple things. Simple pleasures. But unlike Bob’s father, my dad was an entrepreneur. This made a huge difference in his and my life. From a small idea he made a fortune. See below.
I NEVER saw my father rush out the door of his own business dying to get home because he felt trapped. My dad liked his job as proprietor. He had long before learned what you need to start a business. Bob Bly continues…
I met many more people who did not like their jobs when I worked as a technical writer for Westinghouse in the late 70s. These people performed mindless repetitive tasks – like wrapping wire around a cylinder – 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
When the five o’clock whistle blew, they dropped what they were doing and raced out of there with amazing speed. Based on observations of my father and Westinghouse, I soon concluded that – above all else – I wanted to avoid working at a job that I didn’t like … especially one that was boring.
So, after a few years as a wage slave in corporate America, I quit to strike out on my own as a freelance copywriter, seminar leader, and book author … and much later, as an Internet information marketer.
In all the years that I spent in Corporate America as an employee, I experienced the same as Bob, barring one exception. There was a time when working at large companies when I managed to gain enough credibility to secure large budgets and teams so big that they performed within these corporations as a small business might inside a small town.
For several years, for example, I had 75 people reporting into me at a company with 110,000 employees.
Individuals like me were called intrapreneurs because we behave just like my father did, except inside large companies. Short of intrapreneurs, I recognized that only independent contractors came close to imitating my father’s attitude inside corporations…and getting away with it! They better understand what you need to start a business.
Intrapreneurs for the most part love their work so long as they are allowed to behave rather independently within the confines of the corporation, supporting internal “clients” to achieve their corporate objectives.
Because I managed to navigate the politics behind such an arrangement, the years that I spent as an intrapreneur were some of the most fulfilling of my career. I ended up loving my work most of the time, except when I was reminded that I was actually still a wage slave after all. This I needed to change soon enough.
Bob Bly once more…
You could say I am lucky in that I love my work. But you and I don’t get jobs we love through luck, for the most part. You gain the ability to love your work by making a deliberate choice to pursue a career or business that interests you – and staying at it until you succeed. So why do so many small businesses fail? There are a lot of reasons, but a primary one is: they give up too early. Something bad happens. A customer doesn’t pay a large bill. The economy turns sour. So they give up. Way too easily.
I remember a time when my father was having a really lousy season at his bakery. He wanted to expand his operation abroad. But the moment he left his domestic enterprise, the business began to sink and he’d have to rush back to stabilize it. This was very frustrating to him.
He would return home sullen. He knew he was confronting one major limitation in his knowledge and ability. But he never quit.
One of the secrets to success is persistence: pressing on in the face of adversity.
Remember the fight between Rocky and Apollo Creed in Rocky II?
Rocky won the heavyweight championship of the world because he got up after being knocked down … and Apollo didn’t.
The musical group Chumbawamba says in their song Tub Thumping:
“I get knocked down. But I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down.”
Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
“Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
What you need to start a business first and foremost is a willingness never to start it if you are willing eventually to give up. Start knowing you must be persistent and possibly FOR YEARS before you reach your reward. Take it from those of us who are entrepreneurs and heirs of earlier ones.
You must not be a Fred Flintstone to begin with, content with running home to watch TV after clocking out at 5 PM every work day. You may not want to join the Bedrock Country Club. But you may want to have something eventually that you can truly call not only your own but a true reflection of your freedom – the freedom from wage bondage and corporate dependency.
And to get to that, you need to start a business first with a conviction for persistence. Count your cost ahead and your business will last.
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
Luke 14:28-30
Freedom comes at a price. It’s called undaunted persistence. This is what you need to start your business above all.