I once sold a business to a pretty fair-sized NYSE company.

And, of course, I was forced to “wear the handcuffs” for some time thereafter. (My goal is always to make “thereafter” the shortest time possible.)

I may have lasted nine months that time, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Shortly after the deal was done, a guy shows up “from HQ”. He has, among other things, a tape measure. He wants to measure our offices and chart their relative locations.

“What’s this all about?” I ask.

“Nobody gets a window unless they are an EVP or higher. Corner offices are reserved for Directors and no one but YOU can have an office bigger than 18’ X 25’.”

I’m thinking, “Eighteen by twenty-five … heck, that’s 450 square feet. I started out with only 300!”

It was ridiculous.

This was early in the acquisition. For a long time after, I saw much more of same. Rules on travel costs…you virtually needed an autographed baseball to get on a plane. By the time you did, of course, the competition had eaten your lunch. The rules for hiring someone became a sport amongst my sales team. We learned to “head fake” corporate, distracting one of their “H.R. Mavens” while others furtively brought the person on board via some back door.

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In a story that is by now almost apocryphal, a guy by the name of Ewing Kaufman, and upon his discharge from the United States Navy following World War II, went to work for a pharmaceutical company in Kansas City.

The name of this company escapes me right now, but in those days regulations weren’t what they are today and so just about anyone could develop a compound, put it in a gelatin-type capsule, and then mark it up and sell it to hospitals, doctors, and pharmacists.

Pretty clean, pretty simple.

Well, Ewing Kaufman must have been pretty good at selling this stuff, because year in and year out, he would break his own previous year’s sales records. In fact, and by about the third record-breaking year, the management of his company decided that “something had to be done” regarding the amount of money he was earning in commissions, because dear old Ewing was now making even more money than the company President.

You savvy readers already know what happened next --- this company cut Kaufman’s territory in half. With less targets, they figured, he’d likely not break the bank. (Hey, I’m only recounting history --- I’m not saying I agree with any of this.) But when he again registered record sales commissions and they again cut his earning power, he did what any of us would do … he quit and started up his own business.

(I never cease to be amazed by corporate politics.)

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Recently, and for the umpteenth time, I heard the story of a local entrepreneur who completely gutted and reorganized his company over what amounted to a three-day weekend.

“He just went ahead and DID it”, one of his ex-employees told me. “There was no consultation with his key managers, his high-producing employees, or even his world-class board members”. “Instead”, he continued, “He just came to the office one day and announced, ‘this is our new company’, kind of a, ‘love it or leave it type thing’”.

Because no one could make sense of his “new” company, the company’s stock price shot up to about twenty times what it is today. But less than six months after that, the price of their stock fell like bricks from the Eiffel Tower. The appropriate term was, I believe, “It cratered”.

Regular TAE listeners know that I often use the phrase, “everyone’s weakness is in his strength”. And, the strength of this particular CEO was and probably still IS, his intellectual brilliance and his willingness to see a market from a completely different perspective.

In fact, this is precisely how he built his only successful company in the first place.

But, and as many entrepreneurs have already learned, “Round Two” ain’t at all like “Round One”. And to a high degree, this is because the entrepreneur by him or herself is simply just not in the same “viewing position” as the first time.

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The title of this piece is an aphorism I cite very often, both on-air and off air. I have created some seventy-five of these aphorisms. during my thirty-plus years of building and growing companies. (These aphorisms are better known as my “Immutable Laws”, a PDF copy of which you received when you singed up for the Insider’s Report).

I remember giving a speech and was blindsided by the (previously genial) M.C. of the event who, and without warning, proclaimed that this particular Immutable said, “Never hire anyone who is looking for a job”. He was clearly wrong, but he nonetheless succeeded in turning many members of the 200-person audience against me.

Semantically, the difference between these two sentences is minimal. But practically, the two thoughts are worlds apart.

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