When to Think about Your Next Business
I forget where we heard this, but a famous author and researcher asked people to go to the bookstore, either online or in that old thing called a bookstore, to count the number of titles that have the word happy in them. The question alone suggests either few or an abundance, and not surprisingly, the answer is more than you would imagine. There is even a book that summarizes the situation best called, “Happiness Is A Serious Problem.” People’s thoughts on happiness seem to follow an inverse Bell curve. You think about it a lot in your youth, especially if you grew up in a household where your parents wanted to do right by you and wanted to make you happy. You thought about it less during adulthood, as work and life’s other requirements often mean putting one’s own desires on hold. Then, time spent thinking about and optimizing one’s happiness picks up again after having either made sacrifices for others or sensing one’s own mortality.
In our industry, there is a greater level of job satisfaction than in many others. We haven’t done the research, but judging by the ad:tech parties going on this week, we can only assume the real data would correlate to our perceptions. Job satisfaction should correlate to overall levels of happiness. Assuming it does, that works nicely for those in our space; as for many, work and life blend together. They are happy in their lives if they are enjoying what they do. In many ways, it makes the thought process around happiness much easier. It uncomplicates what is an infinitely complex problem. Focus on the process at work, and personal satisfaction may come as a result.
The hardest thing about using work as a measuring stick for self-worth and happiness is what inevitably happens, not just in our industry but in any field. Change happens and not always for the best. Change can be external and/or internal. It can be as simple as Google changing an algorithm and the profitability of campaigns ceasing as a result. It can also be working for someone, getting a new boss, and no longer having the type of work environment as before. These changes are hard to predict. Even harder is that preparing for a change can mean not getting the most out of what you are doing now. It’s a tough balance. Maximizing today but making sure to be prepared for tomorrow.
Very few people, perhaps with exclusion of Bill Gates, can stay in the same role for the entirety of their professional careers. The rest of us need to change. We’ve done it, and while we currently have a high degree of satisfaction, we know we will have to do it again at some point, whether we want to or not. We still don’t know the answer to what would come next, but we have a better sense now of how we might approach the problem. In the past, it has always been about moving to a similar role somewhere else. It has been taking what we learned at one place and trying to find another place that can use it, ideally for more money.
In the last year or so, we’ve started to shift the attitude. We have wanted to find out if there is a way to prepare for the next gig without losing site of the current one. Can we stay hyper-focused without getting blindsided? May anyone not have to find out, but we think that a potential way to do it is to shift what qualifies as next. When we look at what allowed us to do what we do today, the answer, besides relationships, is perceived expertise. By having domain expertise, you can see more clearly what holes might exist in an industry. So, instead of trying to keep an eye open for a lateral or perhaps upward move, go deeper and make sure you know what you might improve.
Some of the businesses we like are best described as innovation from within. People who created things that they might have created when at a company but it wasn’t a good fit. This is very different from someone who didn’t want to do a particular thing at a company because they wouldn’t have made enough money. That is mis-aligned incentives and leads to shady behavior. This is the opposite. It’s not doing the same thing but for someone else or on your own / moonlighting. It’s getting to do something more involved that a segment of the industry might need. It’s not too different from the Tracking202 guys building something they needed, but in building it for them, they found something a large number of others needed as well.
What we see time and again is that there is no substitute for expertise. What we are starting to see now is that expertise can be applied in a nuanced fashion to not just help during an existing job, but it will also be the key to whatever comes next. Most exciting, the key to preparing for what’s next is to not think of what’s next but to get that much more knowledgeable at what you do today. As a result, the key to looking is to not look.
