How do you visualise the process of starting and running a business? I thought of this imagery while thinking about what I’m doing and how I can move forward.
Take a step back, look at the roads you took and the things you did. Compare with the visualization I am going to describe.
The imagery is that of building a jigsaw puzzle.
How do you build your puzzle? I can think of 2 ways
- Start from a familiar piece and build around it until the whole picture is complete.
- Put many separate pieces in place and try to build each island until they join together to form the whole picture.
In the first way, the entrepreneur starts with a core idea. This could be something he/she knows, has experience or an idea. It is like picking up the first piece of the puzzle.
Next he starts looking for pieces that fits and put them together, joining to the starting piece. In business, we start putting together pieces like looking for partners, suppliers, distributors, customers, staffs, office, paperwork.
Slowly but surely the picture becomes more complete just as the picture of a company becomes clearer and clearer as more pieces come together.
I’m not sure if this is typical to many entrepreneurs because this is not what I do, I’m more like the second way.
With the second way of putting together a jigsaw puzzle, we start by putting together a few isolated “island” of pieces.
In the case of business, it is like doing a few things at the same time. Some gurus would caution against this as being too stretched. But I think many entrepreneurs try out a few things. Not all the things work especially well but do the few things together enable them to bring in enough income.
Over time the “islands” grow. Some are larger, some smaller but all are viable. At this point the entrepreneur may start to think “How do I link all these islands together?”
For a jigsaw puzzle, linking is a matter of finding the pieces that join the islands together. For a business it could mean packaging the different services or products. If the entrepreneur is using different identities for each service/product, a holding company or a group identity may be useful.
In my case, I’m at such a crossroad. I had been doing a few things and each of them had been successful to a certain degree. Now I’m thinking about how I can link them or cross-market them.
Of course imagery is never a perfect reflection of reality but an interesting way of looking at things. It is the same here, the two methods certainly do not exactly dissect entrepreneurs into 2 groups but represent different approaches.
Further intesting thoughts:
- Things evolve and the 2nd way could evolve into the first as islands are joined.
- We can imagine the final picture as a vision and build of the puzzle as steps towards the vision.
- In the real world, the puzzle has no boundary so in theory you could build on and on.
- Imagine a puzzle where the picture changes over time, so if you do not find the right pieces fast enough, you may find what you had done become invalid.
I have not come across this analogy anywhere. If you know any author that mention it before, let me know.
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