Is it a good idea or a act of bravado? Not sure. On the one hand I have run my own successful small business (recently, even). I passed it on to my long time business partner and incredible engineer when I saw that we had settled into a semi-comfortable routine that, almost, but not quite made payroll for the three of us that we had relaxed into. In the past I had as many as 6 employees, mostly developers, one customer support person and one system administrator. Turned out we didn’t really need a sysadmin after we moved everything to the “cloud” and as we moved to more of a hosting and ancillary services model (with recurring revenue) instead of a custom development shop, we didn’t need much development staff either.
Not bad. However, I was, basically bored. I hate being bored. It had been almost 15 years since I started that business, it had been a great time but I was ready to try something new. Also I have a pattern of working about 7-10 years in startups and small business and then a similar amount of time in “corporate”. I find it to be a good model to get synced up with what is happening in the bigger businesses regarding tech and trends and I really like not having to worry about payroll for my employees. Healthcare and 401K aren’t a bad thing either. So back to the corporate world I went and it was wonderful for 2.5 years.
Then we got bought and the culture changed, despite C level singing about how just alike the companies were. All the fun left and I discovered that good management and culture really, really matter. Took a package when it was offered and here I am, back to either getting finding a great corporate job with a clear mission and good culture or starting a new business.
I am not afraid, in fact, a straight up consulting business, right in my sweet spot of expertise, seems like the best of both worlds. I can be the “old man” with a depth of experience that the excited new startups and the stodgy traditional healthcare industry businesses (facing complicated mandates or the desire to move off of legacy platforms) can appreciate and get behind.
Happy New Year!
