At the time of writing this 262 responses and 0 "life style" business. That seems pretty nutty to me. Maybe "high growth" captures more than how I read the poll author's intent, but 91 of you are chasing funding/VC/big exit and 0 of you are building a profitable business that can fund its own growth that you enjoy and want to keep control over?
FWIW I'm 7 years in on my fully bootstrapped, profitable, strongly growing, multi-million dollar business, and couldn't be happier.
Agreed, and I don't love that label. In my experience, when someone uses the term "lifestyle company", nearly always that someone is incentivized by funding businesses. Translation: "A company that won't butter my bread, so meh". Insinuation: "People who don't pick up what I'm laying down are second-rate; not alpha entrepreneurs".
So I find the term somewhat derogatory. Instead, I would call a profitable, sustainable company, a "company" -- the presumed norm.
There's nothing wrong with getting on the other-people's-money treadmill, but there's nothing inherently superior about it, either. It's one choice, and AFAIK a relatively unusual one in the wider world.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always considered "lifestyle" business to refer to something that pays your salary, but that doesn't really grow beyond maybe hiring an admin or two. Something like an Insurance Agent type of scope.
As an example, most web consultancies are not meant to be high growth startup type businesses, but its apparent that many grow to be fairly sizable. There are lots of large botique organizations, for instance companies that specialize in RoR development, which can employ 30+ people while still being owned entirely by a single person who expands the business organically to accomodate demand.
Yeah, I wouldn't really consider that a lifestyle business, maybe I'm wrong, but I guess I think there is a middle ground between lifestyle business and "high growth/big exit" business.
Maybe "high growth" captures more than how I read the poll author's intent, but 91 of you are chasing funding/VC/big exit and 0 of you are building a profitable business that can fund its own growth that you enjoy and want to keep control over?
I interpreted the options such that "high growth" includes any company that's intended to eventually IPO - regardless of how long it takes to get there. In that model, these two options are really blurry.
We're bootstrapping, haven't raised any outside funding yet, and it's an open question if/when we will. We definitely want to rely on organic growth as much as possible, but we also intend to build a Really Big Company. We just intend to do it our way, on our timeframe.
I feel like my definition of a lifestyle business is not a multi-million dollar business that has been around for 7 years. At this stage, it looks like you have a healthy, established business you are the sole owner of.
I envy you and one day hope to get there myself. Good luck and I hope you get to grow your business to tens of millions.
FWIW I'm 7 years in on my fully bootstrapped, profitable, strongly growing, multi-million dollar business, and couldn't be happier.