Its amazing how clearly things come to mind, once you stop building your own business and start helping others build theirs', and you get to look back a bit closer on your own career when other entrepreneurs start asking "how did you do that?"
Questions like:
How did you build not one but two high-tech, state-of-the-art, “world class” buildings for your companies? (And why did you do it?)
How did you win that major deal with one of the world's premier Tier 1 manufacturing companies when you were up against the big brands with far more resources and far bigger budgets?
How did you go from selling a few small scoreboards to local schools to then becoming a preferred technology supplier to the NBA, NHL and NFL?
How did you know that a small sale on the other side of the world would become your company’s biggest customer?
How did you solve an electrical noise sensitivity issue on a small, low-cost machine, and then use that little invention to a land a lucrative opportunity with the world leader in environmental technologies?
How did you hire so many great people? And, how did you know in the first interview that they’d be exceptional?
So many great questions that I never gave too much thought to, and to be frank, I wonder why so many of them were not asked earlier. My guess is that when you are "shoulder-to-the-wagon" every day, you don't take too much time to think about it after you've headed out in a specific path, you just keep working at it and save the "how did you do it?" questions for later.
I'm writing a little blog series titled Entrepreneurial Epiphanies answering some of these questions and others.
Follow along if you're interested. Each one represented some key thing I learned - usually the hard way - that became a critical step in my entrepreneurial journey. I'll post them on LinkedIn, but I'll also post the whole series here as I write them.
One great question that was asked of me recently was "what's your (unique) superpower?". It was asked by the chairman of one of the companies I founded, and it wasn't asked from any "pump-your-tires" perspective, it was asked from the perspective that every business founder or leader has one particular skill or trait that they consciously or subconsciously rely on more than any others. I recall that when he asked me, that I couldn't give him a really good answer, but now that I reflect on the answers to some of the questions mentioned at the start of this post, I can.
But, that is the subject of my next post in this series, which will be followed by other key entrepreneurial epiphanies.
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