Starting one’s own business is not a small and non-serious feat. Its a very nail biting and fight-oriented haul. It needs proper planning and a dedicated mindset. The goal could be the same, but the approaches are different as how one proceeds to commence a new startup.
Everyone has their own style and their own interests. If you’re naturally dignified and conservative and you forced yourself to be more bold during the startup phase, then by all means revert to your natural style once your firm picks up momentum. However, if you’re a daring and undignified kind of person and you force yourself to act dignified and conservative to play it safe once you’re doing well, then you’re not being fair to yourself as well as to your clients.
It’s best to just be comfortable and do what you love to do. Jeans or suit, backpack or briefcase, cycle or 2OD; it’s about what works for you. Ideally, it would be nice to be the same person, the same company you started out to be, but as a startup, you have nothing to lose. Once established, you have everything to lose. You walk on a very thin rope in the early days, and its literally a fight for the survival. Very few startup outfits have the flexibility and muscles of having free personality as they need to appeal to the largest and disparate market .
But the key to be successful and resolved in the face of early storms and blows is to act professionally. Professional does not mean loss of creativity or innovation. Professional means getting the job done no matter what it takes yet behaving appropriately. In fact, the greatest employee is someone who can think and learn fast, yet knows how to adapt his or her behaviour to the situation. That does not mean you stop innovating. One could be a fine professional yet one could up with creative and killer ideas all the time.
It is all about adaptation. Be professional to those external groups that value it, which would more than likely be your clients or potiential clients. Be “daring”, “revolutionary”, and congenial with your internal team, if you are not a solo fighter, or if your are then be kind and all that stuff with yourself. If you truely recognize your customers, it is so easy to extend the culture of revolutionism and dynamism to the outside world, which is all yours, if you dare.
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