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The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of your Dreams

had a wife who helped with this role, as well as an ally in the senior ranks of the
business. His wife famously made him think about his role as the director of strate-
gic planning in one of his companies by saying - 'And what did you plan today
dear?' His feisty sidekick on being told of a rather hairy diversification Townsend
was proposing said, 'I don't know what you call that, but we Pollacks call it pissing
in the soup.'

Idea 3 -Be quite clear what your dream is

The best advice you can get from successful people who have done it is the source of
much of this book. All of them are agreed on one thing - don't mix up your objec-
tives. Take, for example, advice on the type of person to hire into your business; it is
quite different depending on your objective. If you are trying to build the 'best' or
the 'biggest', you will have to hire really good people and take on board the prob-
lems such people inevitably bring with them. If your concern is to live the way you
want unfettered by outsiders' demands, you no more want the hassles of the creative
and bright than you want a heron on your goldfish pond.

Eventually the options boil down to three:

• Money. Some people simply want to be rich. They want to make a lot of money
as quickly as possible and then retire early to spend more time with their grown-
up families than they ever did when they were young. To do this, they have to
build a dream business with apparent shareholder value that they can sell in,
probably, an earn-out allowing them to do another three years in the business
before retiring as one of the richest five hundred in the land. The decisions
that such people take will be as consistent as possible with the well-being of
the business as such, but the over-riding objective is their personal wealth and
they will take risks with the business in that regard. As one of them so neatly