Spinning a flywheel summons images of Herculean figures pushing with all their might to painstakingly nudge a giant multi-ton steel wheel in the slightest hint of motion.
The flywheel is a metaphor given to us by Good to Great author Jim Collins. I absolutely love the metaphor and it rings true when it comes to business. Building things of worth, or services that truly bring value to marketplace, takes time and a lot of effort, usually for years before things finally start to take off.
Systems need experimenting and tweaking and adjusting until they finally find a sweet spot where things can pick up steam. It’s something for people interested in starting a new business venture to seriously consider. Why try to reinvent the wheel when you can insert yourself into a preexisting system and improve things?
The flywheel has already been spinning with great momentum at companies that have been in the marketplace for many years and decades.
Sure new start ups can be agile and adapt quickly, but more times than not, they are just chaotic and can’t get out of their own way.
That’s what I realized after I got pushed out of my business venture Faux Real and started my career in aviation at Delta TechOps.
I had to turn off the lights at the shop, let people in the gate, handle phone calls, deal with quality issues, coordinate shipments, order materials, run jobs, sweep the floor, and on and on. It was very taxing.
Little things would go for months without being touched because there were too many fires to put out on a daily basis. You’d think, maybe tomorrow I’ll finally get to that.
Whereas at Delta, I have a specific role and department to work in. All the peripheral help is there to get the job done. There are a sufficient amount of operators, engineers, leads, and plenty of work to go around.
The flywheel is always spinning. It’s just a matter of making things better, in the ways that you were hired to excel at. That’s a beautiful thing, and it makes work feel more like fun than a hellhole.
As a freelance designer during the nights and weekends, it has weighed on my mind more of the things that Jim Collin’s speaks about in his profound book.
‘What can we be the best in the world at’ is something I consider more and more. It goes in line with the popular idea to niche down to find the riches. We must specialize, and be damn good at what we specialize in, in order to succeed.
With limited time, I have to be extremely quick and demonstrably more effective at providing renders and cnc files to my clients in order to be able to charge a rate that makes it worth it to them and to me. I have to be a master at my craft.
And that means I can’t just decide to dabble in a many things. This year I will definitely push myself to be the best CAD designer in Rhino that the world has to over, as well as be the name in CNC routers in the southeast.
Leave a Reply