Transmission Resumes

Thank you for your support to date.

Last year was a lot of fun. I churned out daily blogs on all matters to do with starting a business, and had a lot of fun.

The old adage that the best way to learn is to teach someone else is definitely true.

Through writing the blog I had a chance to reflect about a lot of matters that I deal with and that I see my friends and clients deal with. This has helped me as much as I hope it has helped you all.

Over the year we have received the following feedback:

• Your posts are too long
• Your posts are too short
• I want to know more – do you have any references?
• Holy crap, you don’t pull your punches do you
• And so on.

As well as the feedback above, family issues forced me to realise that life is precious and perhaps some of my rants were a bit too sarcastic or forthright for most people. I have ended up like this after years of working with startups and I can be frustrated at the absolute nonsense that the popular press, including business websites write about starting a business.

This website is intended to be an antidote to that, and I am now endeavouring to rewind the clock and reduce the evident frustration in my blog entries.

I also take issue with experts who have a definite answer to problems. Guess what, that is technically, physically, conceptually and philosophically impossible.

Business and markets are too complex to have a one size fits all solution. Sure there can be trends and general activities that work, but the fact is that a lot of the solutions you need are both industry specific and personally specific. In other words, there is a lot you are going to have to work out yourself, and you need to accept uncertainty and give yourself time to learn.

The aim of the Grow a Set blog as always is to help the 99.9%. Yes, the 99.9% of business that aren’t high tech startups funded by Silicon Valley VCs.  And in the spirit of the Occupy movement, I will continue to occupy the word startup to cover any new business.

So, here we are in 2012 and I endeavour to write the blog regularly, make sure it is both longer and shorter (whatever), and provide further references where I can. I may be gentler too…. we’ll see.