I have a few friends who’ve gone through business school, and a few who have run the gauntlet through the venture capital world getting their companies off the ground. They all tell me that I need to get equity funding so I can expand my company faster.
When I say “they all tell me”, I mean that. Every single one of them tells me that.
One of the very few dissenting voices comes from a man who’s now dead, a man I regret I’ll never meet. His name was Felix Dennis. He was a poet, spoken-word performer, and – for most of his life – one of the richest men in the UK.
One of my favourite poems of his contains the following prose:
Expansion? It’s vanity!
Profit is sanity.
Overhead begs
To walk on two legs.
Among my generation of entrepreneurs, there is no dirtier, uglier idea than profit, with the possible exception of debt financing. It’s all about growth, at any cost.
I know which voice I’m going to listen to. It won’t make me popular, but it’ll keep me profitable.