For Mom
This post is for my mom. She has struggled to explain what I do for a living throughout my 30-year professional career. I have heard her say that I am a consultant, but she can’t explain it much beyond that. After building and selling the consulting firm Kalypso, I am now a consultant to consultants, helping other people start professional service firms at The Launch Box.
When we started Kalypso, we worried about the big things. Would anybody hire us? Who would want to work for us? How are we going to pay our mortgages? All those questions answered themselves pretty quickly and were never really an issue. The stuff we thought would be hard, was actually kind of easy.
What we did not know was what an amazing pain it is to build a scalable business. Health insurance, a 401k, state taxes, legal issues, human resources, websites, email, payroll, accounting, and all of the day-to-day nonsense that is required to run a legitimate business consumed our lives and kept us out of the marketplace more than was healthy for a startup.
We did this while we had to keep selling, delivering, recruiting, developing people, and growing the business to keep the bankers at bay and deal with the annoying regularity of a biweekly payroll. This experience is the simple basis for The Launch Box. Make the hard stuff easy and alleviate the enormous stress of back-office operations and capital constraints - let founders focus on the things that are most important to success and let us take care of the rest.
Three years into this new venture we have launched eight fast-growing consulting firms with incredibly talented and dedicated entrepreneurs. Those firms provide a range of services including cybersecurity, cloud technology, human resources, digital asset management, and sales and marketing. I have the privilege of doing work that I love with partners, colleagues, and clients who are like family (even if they are frequently frustrating and unruly.)
So there you go, Mom. Next time it comes up you can just refer to this post.
