Story 1: Be a hero, grow passionately

Ulla is chasing her passion to create something new and exciting while simultaneously ensuring that the current business is competitive and creating enough cashflow for her exciting endeavors. She understands that the new and uncertain business opportunity might be a failure, but the opportunity is too exciting to pass by. There is a saying that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; however, that logic seems to be irrational for Ulla—why be too careful if you can achieve success by pursuing your dreams? Her mother consistently warns Ulla not to put everything behind the same idea and that she needs to take care of the current business. Ulla thinks that the reason for her mother’s warnings was the failure of her uncle, a former director at Nokia mobile division, who does not seem to have recovered ever since the business collapsed. However, Ulla thinks to avoid that path, she would need to be at least a few steps ahead of the competition, and the only way to do that is to be brave and invest in new opportunities.

Ulla has her own target: to double her revenue every year. Rapid growth has changed the company significantly, and its peoples have grown with the company. Ulla has applied her personnel policy for some years for now, and it has been the key to avoiding internal conflicts.

She only hires people of certain types: those who have no fear of change, are strongly self-confident, and are able to adapt to different kinds of situations. Nowadays, although it has more employees, the company looks totally different from five years ago. There are now three different businesses compared to the single one five years ago. About a year ago, she had divided all the businesses into three different business units rather than having them all as one business unit. She tried to separate the team members and run all of these three businesses separately for quick growth and efficient team management. At that time, she felt that was a perfect strategy to develop all of these businesses, given all three are different. However, the strategy did not work. Sales dropped quickly, and she had to re-evaluate her decision. She decided to take everyone back to the one structure system, after which the businesses resumed their growth. The growth has been encouraging and has helped her to go to new business areas. Her target is to grow the current businesses significantly, but at the same time to expand

to new business areas. Every day seems to be more or less managing the current business and keeping the ball rolling on new ventures.

Ulla has networked well and tries, at least once a year, to meet an interesting businessperson and spend some time with him or her. She likes to read articles on LinkedIn to get new business ideas and reads business papers on weekends. Ulla likes discussing with her key customers to obtain new insights into the product offering and to hear what they think about her current services.

Ulla weighs a few key factors as she decides whether to go for the new business. First, she considers the competition; too much competition reduces the attractiveness. Next, she evaluates the profits. If it is profitable and she is able to cash in quickly, that would be great.

Lastly, she assesses its scalability. Is it scalable? If the competition is not too much, it is profitable, and highly scalable, she goes all in. She has noticed that it is easier to grow an old business, but it is slower and less attractive than moving to new areas. As Ulla sees herself as a risk taker, it is natural to go for a high risk with a high reward.

To be a growth-oriented entrepreneur, one thing is mindful: you must be a master in scheduling. The day includes activities related to improving current business and fine tuning it and at the same time creating something new and exciting. You have ensure that you are not biting off more than you can chew.

Entrepreneurs tend to be lone wolfs, and Ulla is not an exception. When you have created your own company basically from scratch, some can say that you know what you are doing.

Sometimes, when she is awake at night while others sleep, Ulla feels that the stakes are too high, and that her mother’s wise words about looking before leaping are well-founded. But, if you are growing fast, being overly careful is good, she thinks. She finds comfort in being able to discuss these things with her colleagues and advisors, and to hear that she is doing the right things. However, sometimes Ulla notices that her employees tend to be a bit too careful in judging her decisions.

Nowadays, they have a culture of failure, and Ulla usually fails more than others. They tell about failures and laugh. Ulla says that it helps to create a work environment that allows failing, and in that way, people are confident enough to tell about their new, even crazy ideas.

One example of a failure happened just a few days ago. Ulla is a very intuitive person, and she trusts her intuition a lot in personal and business relationships. Just a few days ago, she had to kill one of the biggest projects ever in the history of the company, where they had put so much time and money. It just did not fit perfectly. All elements were not in place. After Ulla discussed the failure with others, they agreed that it was a good idea to kill the project since it seemed to go waste. After a weekend, they had a new version ready and were back on track again. Now, they plan to launch the new version during the next month. This new version is one of the biggest projects in their history and offers the opportunity to move completely into a new customer segment. This will also partially change their business. If the launch is successful, they will not only be selling products, but also services on a large scale.

Ulla sometimes argues with Pekka, her production manager, about the work balance. Pekka says that if he had to focus so much on the new concept, he would not have time to lead other workers and take care of incoming orders. Ulla has thought about whether she should promote Pekka to the management team; he has years of experience in their business. However, he has not been very receptive to the new business ideas. Pekka thinks they should take care of their current customers and employees and make sure they avoid too much overlap. After doubling the revenue, Ulla noticed that the old way of doing things is not working and has started a project to improve the processes and IT systems. It is still quite unclear to Ulla how the other employees can meet the requirements and focus on the new business. How can the current jobs be handled if the bottleneck is the IT system? She would need to focus on this issue in the coming month, or it might significantly slow their processes when they launch the new version of their best-selling product. Ulla has been looking for some professionals or mentors to help with the process, but it seems that many of them do not understand the business and her ambition for the business and how it should work. The business could be much faster and easier to grow if things. such as IT, in which Ulla has limited experience, could be solved.

Cashflow worries Ulla. The current business has a steady and nice cashflow, but she has been investing quite much in the new business. More cash is needed for the marketing before the launch. If everything does not start smoothly, more money will be needed to run the operations and perhaps to add to the marketing costs. It is also still unclear what the success rate would be. If the new version is a success, she would need to bring in more people. But to which side does she recruit? Should she take more people to the traditional business, which has an easier

training process for newcomers, or should she infuse fresh ideas into the new business area?

This has to be decided during this week, or they may run into problems. Unfortunately, Ulla has lost two weeks when she had to help at production. They had summer holidays, and because of the growth, she had to use all of her time to assist in managing the workload.

Moreover, one of their biggest customers asked her to visit them this week, and she is hoping it is for something good. If they decide to go to a competitor, Ulla and her team will have to evaluate all of their projects again. But Ulla hopes that they just want to put in a big order or develop something new together.