Good business is providing the same great service at the great price with the great smile again and again.
Good business is collecting the money on time, investing in your systems, keeping your costs under control and building the "platform" (team, content, technology, processes) to scale.
Good jobs provide a variety of challenges, hefty pay hikes & a great work environment.
Good jobs are about doing new stuff. Good jobs are cool to talk about at parties.
Good business is boring. Good jobs are exciting!
When you start a new business, all jobs at the start-up are exciting.
As a new business gets to a point where the value proposition is getting well-defined, the delivery processes are getting mature, some of the cool "let's figure out how to do this" goes away.
The innovation is no longer at a product/service definition level but at an implementation level. The problems that need attention are not about "what should we do?" but "we know what to do. how can we do it better? "
How can we sign-up 10% higher customers this quarter with the same value-prop & the same budget?
How can we improve our hiring ratio by 5%?
How can we deliver a 10% higher margin across 100 customers?
There are opportunities for innovation. Many of them. There is path-breaking stuff but not of the type that existed when the venture started.
If we build a good, profitable business, there will be opportunities to create something from scratch all over again - within the same business or as a spin-off. But first, a good business has to be built.
Earlier 80% of the time was spent on concept-level discussions. Now 80% is around doing existing stuff better. The team has to now focus on making 5-10% improvements in the existing business.
The team that came together for a good job now has to do good business. But that is not what most of them came for.
The shared ownership route is seen as the way to align the stakeholders. Build a good business today and make lots of money through your stock options tomorrow.
Maybe the correct way is to emphasise that a good job is not about excitement and novelty. A good job is about building a good business. A good business that delivers great value to its customers & its stakeholders.
Good business is how wealth gets created.
And good business is boring. Get used to it.
