Small Is the New Big | Printer-friendly version

And that, oddly enough, has been one of the long-term consequences of the ordeal he went through in the spring of '97. It was the beginning of a major change in his perspective on business, he says, forcing him to start thinking about fundamental issues he'd never considered before--such as, how big is big enough? And even, what is success?

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I thought, You know what? Having calm, controlled growth is good. I would never have said that before. Never. I'd actually heard someone say it when I was in my twenties, and I'd thought, You're a wimp."

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The FramerSelect debacle turned out to be a watershed. "I'd always thought that, for me to be happy, I had to have phenomenal growth and turn this into a giant company. It didn't occur to me that there are a lot of really happy people with very nice $10 million companies making good profits, and that those guys are often way happier than guys with companies 10 times their size. That's what it comes down to. Happiness is not who's got the biggest company. Happiness is a whole lot of other things."

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"There are three stages to every business," says Goltz, "the start-up phase, the throw-up phase, and the grow-up phase."

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"I've gone from being 75% entrepreneur and 25% manager to 75% manager and 25% entrepreneur," he says. "Now I recognize, which I never did when I was starting all these businesses and new things, that my major job is hiring and training managers. Before, I never had the time to do it, and my head wasn't into it. The idea of management would just bore me to tears. But I'm feeling very good about building depth in my organization. I have found it very satisfying."

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"I look around the company, and I get tremendous satisfaction out of the fact that I have wonderful people working for me, and they're doing great things and making customers happy. I realize that I've got it big enough that I'm doing just fine. I'm making enough income now that I can live a very nice life. I don't need to be off starting new businesses. I just want my business to run itself to a degree, so that I can be free to go out and do speeches or whatever. That's happiness. For me, happiness is not about building a $100 million company."

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