7 minute watch
New Castle, NH
So many of you—our Entrepreneur Owner-Manager friends and your expert advisors— have asked us about ways to easily access and immediately use some of our experience as you think about building durable Enterprise Value and a capital gain someday. You can find it in the EOM Resource Library section of our website, but up ‘til now, it’s mostly written, not video.
Here’s a short video illustrating a concept we call the Entrepreneur Life Arc. It will be familiar to our friends who have attended the Bigelow Forum. Hope you enjoy it.
What I am Reading / Listening to
Little Women (2019)
By Greta Gerwig
Those of you who know me well know that I am deliberately somewhat disconnected from, and thus probably a terrible judge of, our current mass popular culture, but nonetheless I will be surprised if Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig) doesn’t massively score with audiences and even—the Academy Awards (but perhaps that shows my political naiveté).
I am by nature more a “reader” and participant than a “watcher,” and so I went to Little Women with a pretty strong sense of skeptical detachment. And, you know what? I was utterly blown away. How could a story first written in the 1860's be so fresh in 2020? When I learned the film maker Greta Gerwig was also the creative genius behind Lady Bird, I had an aha moment. She clearly knows Louisa May Alcott’s novel intimately well, and brings it to life with themes that echo powerfully today. Whoa, if only we all had that sense of muscular companionship with our friends and families!
Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote
“ I thought; If I don't have my business, will I lose my identity? Who am I going to be? And then... you find out that there's a whole other person that has a second life."
- Allison Hooper, Former Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vermont Creamery, Inc.
Energy Creation
I almost always think of Labor Day more than January 1 as New Year (left over from the bittersweet end of summer and adolescent dread of being forced to go back to school, to be taught what a bureaucrat thought kids should learn). But this year—January 1, 2020 has a certain magical charm to it—at least to me. For over ten years now, when thinking about the future of our business we’ve been talking about Bigelow 2020. I remember back in 2010 when the Landing School of Boatbuilding & Design held an all-day planning session for a wide group of constituencies (brilliantly led by Shannon Polly), we called it Landing School 2020. Its more than just a New Year, it’s more than just a new decade, it’s a time we can get unstuck. We can choose to get unblocked, rediscover our positive energy, and commit to discovering more of our potential. Some of you mentioned you enjoyed this little year end planning exercise: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6617035736648609793/
2020 is choice for all of us. It’s a choice because we are on this path by choice. Can’t wait.
