Michelangelo said that the job of the sculptor was to 'free the forms that were already there' - that sculpting involves chipping away all that disguises the statue already hidden within the stone. By that definition, I've spent a lifetime 'sculpting' predictable success: my career has been a process of chipping away the confusion, misinformation and presuppositions to uncover the true nature of success, hidden beneath.

I've always been fascinated by the patterns of success: as a child I was intrigued by why certain kids were more popular in school, why each year one toy would become the must-have Christmas gift, why a specific sport or hobby would 'go viral' in the neighborhood. Business in particular fascinated me. I loved it when my Dad would take me into his office and I could wander around this strange landscape of desks and chairs and typewriters (yes, typewriters - it was that long ago). At the age of 11, I had three part-time jobs: there was a milk delivery plant nearby and I would climb out of bed at 4.30 am to go stand with other kids at the factory gates, where we would be hired each morning by milk delivery men to help them on their rounds; at 7.30 am I would start my morning newspaper round, and at 4pm, my evening paper round. I was quite the little mogul.

I was intrigued by the comparative success of two local stores - our local convenience store had been trading successfully in the same spot for as long as anyone could remember - generations, probably, but another shop just fifty feet away never seemed to succeed, despite a cycle of hopeful tenants, each doomed to failure as certain as the last. (I came up with an abtruse theory about traffic patterns and pedestrian flow.)

My First Discovery

So in my late teenage years, when my father decided to leave the security of his office job and open - you guessed it - a local convenience store, I was excited at the possibility of learning more about how a real business (albeit a mini-business) worked. Unfortunately, the excitement didn't last long - the business failed within a year, and my parents had to declare bankruptcy.

For my Mom and Dad, I'm sure this must have been a painful, anguished time - they mostly hid that aspect from my sister and me - but they buckled down and worked their way out of it, and after a period when we lived with my grandparents life returned to relative normality.

For me, the experience was bewildering. Why had our little shop failed when tens - hundreds - of other similar stores were thriving around us? What did the owners of those stores know that we didn't? Was there something we should have done, but hadn’t? Was there something we didn't do that we should have? Intellectually, I was adrift - I didn’t know how to analyze what had just happened - worse, I didn't even know where to start.

Partly as a result of this bewilderment, partly because of the financial constraints the business collapse had caused, and partly because of advice I received, I dropped my college plans (I had intended to study journalism), and instead entered into a five-year articleship to become a Chartered Accountant - the British equivalent of a CPA. I thought that a solid grounding in accounting would fill the gaps in my understanding about what made businesses succeed or fail.

During those five years I began for the first time to chip away at my understanding at what makes for success in business. I spent days, weeks - months - in offices, attics, basements, showrooms, lumber yards, factories and warehouses, poring over general ledgers, analyzing accounts receivable, counting inventories, registering assets and estimating liabilities. I learned about cash flow, profit margins, liquidity, balance sheet strength, return on investment, price/earnings ratios and working capital. I loved every minute of it. I studied like a demon, and in my two-part finals I came first in Ireland in part 1, and and second in Ireland in part 2. Basking in the glow of success, I moved to London for a year, where I worked for one of the 'big eight' accounting firms (as they were then), to experience what it was like to audit enormous, multinational companies.

When I returned to Ireland to join an accounting and consulting firm as a partner at just 23, I believed I had unlocked the mystery of business success. It was simple: if you got the numbers right, everything else would follow. We accountants had the secret of business success - we just weren't that good at explaining it. I decided my personal path to success was to become the best communicator the accounting profession would ever see. I not only knew the secret of business success, now I would explain it to anyone who wanted to hear - for a fee.

For 9 years, I expounded my new-found knowledge for my long-suffering clients, and at their expense I honed my ability to 'get the numbers right', first in the firm I had joined when I returned to Ireland, then five years later when I struck out on my own. I became more and more hands-on, not just helping my clients interpret their results once a year, but meeting with them regularly and helping them proactively shape their balance sheet, profit and loss accounts and cash flows.

Increasingly, clients began to recommend me to their friends and peers. I gained a reputation as the accountant of choice for anyone thinking of starting a business, and I began to specialize in helping people set up new ventures. Eventually I dropped the compliance work (accounts and tax preparation) entirely, to concentrate solely on my consulting clients. People began to ask me to take a more active role in their start-ups. Sometimes a couple of entrepreneurs would approach me with an idea, but no money, sometimes they had the money, but no business concept. I started to selectively identify new ventures I was interested in, and which I thought would succeed, and agreed to act as co-founder in those that passed my ‘it’s all in the numbers’ test.

Mmm - Maybe There’s More To It Than That... 

In the space of five years, I took an active role in the launch of 42 companies, including such diverse businesses as a tool and die manufacturer, a PR agency, a graphic design agency and a computer training company. I bought the Pizza Hut Master Franchise for Ireland and with my partner opened 10 restaurants. I sold my interest in most of these businesses back to the other founders over time. A few failed, most continued as small business providing a good living for their owners, and some went on to great success.

And I discovered something very interesting.

In this frenzy of new venturing, I had (albeit unwittingly) chipped away another piece of stone, and moved considerably closer to understanding the true cause of success. What I found out was this: It wasn't about the numbers.

Sure, having a well-funded business with good financial management didn't do any harm. But in getting my hands dirty with real businesses for the first time, it became clear that simply getting the numbers right - having a strong balance sheet, good cash flow, good profitability - wasn't in itself an indicator of success. Put simply: A lot of well-financed businesses still went under. (20 years later, the dot-com bubble would underline this point.)

I watched seemingly well-financed businesses go under for reasons that on the surface looked unconnected: over-confident sales projections, poor salesmanship, lack of commitment, over-investment in assets being just a few. But when I analyzed the reasons in more depth, a pattern began to emerge: it wasn't the numbers, it was the people that made the ultimate difference between success and failure.

With that, another piece of stone fell away. The statue I was carving (I didn't have a name for it then, 'predictable success' would come later) was beginning to form a shape - blurry, incomplete - but a shape, nonetheless. And the shape so far was that business success - true, lasting business success - came not from a well-structured balance sheet and good financial management - it came from the people. If you didn't have the right people, it was only a matter of time before the money would run out.
It was time to chip some more.

Wholesaling Predictable Success 

In 1991, I was approached by a former client to join him in a wacky idea. The concept was to develop a training program to teach people how to launch new businesses. That wasn't the wacky part - it was really just wholesaling what I was doing as a consultant on a retail basis. The wacky part was that this program would be run in West Belfast, then a highly dangerous flashpoint during one of the most murderous periods of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland.

Not surprisingly, West Belfast had a horrendous unemployment problem, and the Entrepreneurship Program (as it was to be known) was an attempt to help reduce the unemployment rate in the area. The upside was that the UK government was heavily subsidizing the program. They were prepared to pay my partner and I well - very well - and in what I hoped wasn't a commentary on just how dangerous the area was, they were prepared to pay our fee 100% upfront. I took the gig.

The Entrepreneurship Program was an out-of-the-park success. My partner and I worked hard at both the curriculum and the training itself, and after a couple of cohorts had moved through the program, we had the whole process down. In keeping with my evolving model, we became very good at picking the right people for the program, and making sure that they were as well funded as possible, often using some of the government money that was available for the area. The program exceeded every metric that was set for it, and within a year, my partner and I were being approached by other agencies throughout the UK to do something similar.

Over the next decade, we ran versions of the Entrepreneurship Program from incubation units across the UK, launching hundreds of business eventually employing thousands of employees. The program won the prestigious European Union Job Challenge Award, and we built other business development programs, eventually operating in Canada, the US, Singapore, Paris and Dubai.

This international dimension gave me a unique opportunity to observe how businesses grew and developed in different cultures, which in turn helped me separate the transcendent, overarching principles of business success from those that were merely temporal, or geographically- or culturally-specific.

Then another large piece of stone fell off, revealing something very interesting.

What happened was this: For a few years, we launched wave after wave of new businesses, founded - as much as possible- on the twin precepts of being well funded, and with the right people. And of course, after two or three years of launching new businesses, and certainly by years four, five, six and beyond, we were no longer working with just ‘new’ businesses - our early launchees were now fully fledged, mature or maturing businesses.

Some of them began to fail. Even though we believed we had the right people and good financing, some of the businesses began to shudder and stall. Sometimes the original founders would need to be replaced (or wanted to be replaced), sometimes we needed to bring in an additional senior executive to get the business through the ‘shuddering’ and out the other end, and sometimes the business would just plain fail.

Chipping Off The Final Pieces

I felt like I was right back in my parent’s little convenience store. What was happening here? Why were the twin precepts - well financed, right people - not enough? What had I missed - or worse, what was I doing that I shouldn’t?

Again, after some analysis, the answer became obvious:
It’s not the numbers. It’s not even the numbers and the people. It’s the numbers, and the people and the structure they operate in. The numbers - and more importantly the people - have to work within a vibrant, organic, dynamically changing organization. Structures that had worked well for our start-ups weren’t holding up as the businesses grew larger. More importantly, oftentimes the founder/owner(s) either couldn’t see the need to change the structure, didn’t have the ability to change the structure, or simply didn’t want to change the structure.

With this final chip falling off, I could see now see the full outline of the sculpture. It didn’t take long to figure out that what I had identified (that the structure needed to change between start-up and maturity) was highly likely to be only one of a series of changes that every organization would need to make as it got bigger and more complex. It seemed to me probable that there was a specific sequence of structural shifts over time that any successful organization - in fact, as I was to discover, any successful group - had to go through.

It was now just a matter of decoding that sequence.

Honing The Model 

By then, in 1999, I was sending an increasing amount of time in the United States, managing our business interests there. I had fallen in love: with Marin County, just outside San Francisco, and more importantly with a woman who who lived there, and who would eventually become my wife. I decided to sell my interests in the consulting and other businesses I had back in the UK, and I moved to Marin, committed to polishing and honing the statue - to do whatever was needed to fully understand what I was beginning to call ‘predictable success’.

I read everything I could find that dealt with business lifecycles, attended workshops and seminars that helped me understand more about what I was discovering, and wrote, taught and consulted on the subject - always returning as a touchstone to my experiences with the hundreds upon hundreds of businesses I helped launch, and the more than 40 that I personally co-founded. Eventually, what you will read in this book emerged, fully formed.

For the last ten years I have had the privilege of working alongside inspirational leaders in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in every imaginable industry and sector, helping them inject predictable success into their organizations. I wrote this book to make the predictable success methodology available to a wider audience than I can reach through my teaching and consulting. I sincerely trust you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

For me, it’s the culmination of a lifetime’s work helping leaders grow both themselves and their organizations.

For you, I hope it is just the start.