What I want the next ten years to look like

I'm terrible at five-year plans.

So naturally I'm going to talk about ten.

Not a plan, though. I've learned to distrust plans that come with exact numbers and a slide. What I have is closer to a direction. A list of things I'd like to be true, and a few I'd like very much not to be.

What I don't want

Let's start there, because it's easier.

I don't want to be the biggest. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: wanting to be the biggest is the fastest way I know to lose your freedom. Every extra layer of size comes with someone you have to answer to, a cost you have to cover, a target you didn't choose.

I don't want a clock. No round, no investor, no exit date written in someone else's spreadsheet. If Foxnice is ever sold, merged or closed, I'd like it to be because we decided, not because a calendar did.

I don't want to be indispensable. For a long time I was the person everything passed through. It felt important. It was actually fragile. A company that can't run without its founder isn't a company. It's a job with extra paperwork.

And I don't want to stop learning. The kid who built his first website at twelve, at night, with free courses, is still in there somewhere. If the next ten years turn him into someone who only manages, something went wrong.

What I do want

A company that works without me watching it. Not without me. Without me watching it. There's a difference, and it's the whole point.

Products that keep earning their place. Every one we've built came from a problem we'd solved more than once for clients. I'd like the next ones to come from the same place. Not from a trend, and not from a napkin.

Fewer clients who are a better fit, rather than more who aren't. Small businesses, clubs, people who are tired and need things to just work. I'm happy to keep building for sectors nobody finds sexy.

Yeray. We've been friends and partners for more than twenty years. If all goes to plan, in ten years we'll be past thirty. I can't think of a business plan that beats that one.

And time. Not lots of free time, necessarily. Time I choose. A calendar with gaps in it, where the gaps are mine.

I don't want the next ten years to be bigger than the last twelve. I want them to be more mine.

Ambition, without the size

People sometimes hear all this and assume I've run out of ambition.

I don't think so. I think I've just moved it.

Ambition for me is being able to say no to things that pay. It's building something that lasts longer than my enthusiasm for it. It's a company that's still small, still profitable and still free in ten years, in a world that keeps telling small companies they don't count.

That's not a modest goal. It's a stubborn one.

So, the next ten years? I don't know exactly what they'll look like. That's rather the point.

If I knew, I'd have sold them to an investor already.

P.S. I'll check back on this in 2036. If I've written a ten-year plan with a slide by then, someone please stop me.