Tech Businesses are just Businesses after all

I have a basic premise that I like to share whenever potential clients with little experience in the tech industry come in to talk to us:

The "Business" around a Tech business is like every other business.

Let me explain ...

In a tech business, like every other business, you have to manage growth, cashflow, changing markets, and shifting opportunities & risks every single day, month, year, and decade throughout your existence.

Without that deliberate and fairly conservative management strategy, your venture is likely to be a flash-in-the-pan or at best a very long lucky streak before it will falter and need more capital investment just to keep feeding the cash that it's burning.

If you build a business to service only one type of client or a customer base that all have the same motivations for buying your services as each other (land grabbing on new technology for example), when those motivations shift (as society does constantly), you damned well better be ahead of the curve and try to predict how you can service the next iteration of your customer base ... or risk trying to sell a dream to someone who is no longer willing to just dream.

The inverse can be said, too. Especially within the ever-so-cool, startup-centric-tech-entrepreneur-set.

If you are only ever trying to place yourself at the cutting edge to leverage greenfields opportunities before they happen, it's all too easy to forget that a truly sustainable business needs stability at its base.

Having more than a few grey hairs myself, and the experience that comes along with successfully navigating and iterating our own tech business (Creative Intersection) through ups and downs over the past 18 years, I can tell you that a conservative mindset to nurturing this base can help more safely take advantage of cutting-edge opportunities as they approach.

If you forget that you have a full range of things to keep an eye on in your business, the neglected ones will eventually come back and bite you.


Ian Exaudi
Managing Director
Creative Intersection Pty Ltd