The best business decision I ever made

ColoradoBiz, March, 2003 by Pat Wiesner

Now THAT I'M SORT OF RETIRED, someone asked me the other day what I thought was the best business decision I ever made, Tough question.

Fortunately for me, the best decision I've ever made wasn't the result of some excruciatingly difficult moral dilemma or some painful lesson learned the hard way.

It came about rather innocently, kind of by accident or default.

It happened early in my business life and is a concept that has been responsible in no small part for whatever success this company has had.

Wiesner Publishing was started on a shoe-string. I had been "consulting" for about three years after my last real job and I had decided to try to start my own business. So I leased a one-room office in old Littleton and outlined an idea for a magazine, "Private Cable."

I couldn't afford to hire anyone so I did everything myself. It was in the days of the first Apple computers, and I bought one and learned how to do my own circulation list. At the same time I solicited articles and tried to sell advertising.

It's not the easiest trick to sell advertising in a magazine that doesn't yet exist, but it's also something I've learned many times since.

At the same time I went to the State of Colorado to register a name for my new venture. My first try was the name LAMP Inc.

I wasn't going to tell anyone what the name stood for (Laugh A Minute Publishing!), but it was chosen to remind me that I never wanted to get into the kind of pressure cooker that I had left a couple years earlier.

The state, however, told me Colorado already had a LAMP Inc., and therefore I had to settle for the much less meaningful and mundane Wiesner Publishing. So much for the easy part.

That done, I went back to doing everything myself.

It occurred to me that I knew a couple of guys who knew a lot about the business and that they might be interested in joining a new company One was a great editor, the other a great salesman. Just what I needed! So we all got together and fortunately for me they got excited about our prospects. We went into business together; I was a 60 percent owner and they were each 15 percent owners. At the time none of our equity positions was worth a dime except that they included a blueprint to achieve a dream we all had.

And so there it was: the best business decision I had ever made.

I didn't recognize it as the best business decision I ever made until years later, of course.

But I had found good people and given them the opportunity they wanted.

The three of us worked as hard as was possible, giving more than we thought we had, and together we accomplished more than any one of us could have done by ourselves. We had a lot of fun, we struggled with failures and roundly enjoyed every little success.

We were totally engaged.

What at the time seemed the only sensible thing to do turned out to be the way the three founders ran the company. We looked for the best people we could find, got to know them well enough to know what they wanted out of a job, and then tried to set up a way for them to achieve their goals working for us. Basically their goals became our goals. Better yet, we discovered that when the company's goals and employee goals intertwine, everyone wins.

Pat Wiesner is the retired CEO of Wlesner Publishing, publisher of ColoradoBiz. He now spends much of his time leading sales and management training for the company.