Doug Richard: Why do people hate lifestyle businesses?

It can be frustrating though as many decisions seem to come down to the fact that any money spent in the business on employees, marketing, office space, servers, tools, etc is coming out of his pocket. Even though that is never stated outright by my boss, it is constantly in the back of my mind any time the cost of a project is discussed and especially when something is shot down with no other reason given.

There is also a lot of room for growth and profit in our niche market so knowing that the company is being artificially limited is frustrating. With that said, the company itself is relaxed, family friendly and very stable. I often get annoyed with decisions made but when I think about starting my own business and put myself in my boss's shoes I can understand many of his choices.

Why not? I know some people want to take claim of the term because they chose one path that may have had more sacrifices but their way isn't the only way.

Hours worked per week is one of the least significant factors in defining "startup" for me.

In any case, the result is that discussion, comments and advice for startups will sometimes be different than for a lifestyle business, funding being one of the obvious topics. Another is that yes, size of the business is important. Profit is not just the bottom line, the other is influence or power.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

I used to work for a well-run small tech company that was basically an automatic money machine for the owner: a self-taught engineer. Then he decided he wanted to sell and take a few years off so he sold it to a group of "professional businessmen" who were great at raising the cash to buy the business. Sales began to tank within months and a few years later it was out of business even though the new owners kept pouring money into it (hint: if you bought a wildly profitable business, having to inject your own cash to keep it afloat should be a sign of something wrong!!).

They came up with every excuse in the book at every juncture, but anyone working there knew the real reason: they didn't have an f'ing clue what the hell they were doing!

OK, I deleted the rest of the rant :-) The real problem was that these guys acquired a successful lifestyle business and wanted to to scale it rapidly. Nothing wrong with that, but the problem was that because they were so well connected to capital, they completely ignored the point that in their previous companies, there were entire departments devoted to making good use of that cash after it was raised. But in this tiny business they had just bought, they would have to make those decisions or delegate them. Since the only people they could delegate to were two young engineers (who, of course, couldn't possibly know more about the business than they did!! - yes this is sarcasm!) that was simply not going to happen.

So instead we got to watch them make expensive mistake after expensive mistake until the cash ran out, all the while wondering how people so stupid could manage to raise so much money.