What's Your Future Intent?
Where do you ultimately want this company to land? And when that day comes, how do you want to hand it off?
Most of us never ask that question when we start out. I grew up watching my family run a small jewelry store in western New York that started in 1929, in the middle of the Great Depression, and it lasted three generations. That was just the culture I grew up in. You start something and you keep it going. You work hard, you grow it, you build something with real meaning, and someday you hand it to your kids. There is nothing wrong with that path. A lot of us step into entrepreneurship with that exact assumption baked in, even if we never say it out loud. The business is just going to be there. For decades.
But there is another way to think about this, and it is a completely different mindset. What if you start a business with the intent to sell it? Not to run it for thirty years, but to grow it as fast as you can, build real value into it, and move it so you can go build the next thing. That requires a different set of skills entirely. You are not in the weeds running the day to day. You are building infrastructure, because the value of a company like this comes from its systems and its sales, not from how well you personally know every customer or every detail. It is a shift from being the operator to being the architect. Both approaches are valid. Both can be deeply meaningful. But they pull you in very different directions from almost day one.
So ask yourself this early, because it changes everything about how you build. Do you want something you will still be running in twenty years, something that might outlast you and become part of your family's story? Or are you building this to sell, so you can take the capital and the experience and go build something else? There is no right answer here. But if you do not answer it for yourself, you will end up building a business that fights against your own intentions, and you will not even realize it until you are years in.
If you ever have any questions or would be interested in having Scott do some Entrepreneurship Coaching with you, please reach out to him at Scott@ColsenKeane.com
