Three Things I Would Do Differently If I Built My Company Again

I started my first company at 19. Over the next 33 years I built it into a national chauffeured transportation network, and then I sold it.

I don't have regrets. But I do have hindsight. And when founders ask me what I would change if I could do it all again, the answer is always the same three things.

1. Run the company on EOS from the start

For most of those years, we ran on effort. Long hours, good people, and a lot of heroics. It worked, until it didn't.

Every decision eventually found its way back to my desk. Priorities changed depending on what was on fire that week. Our meetings were busy, but they rarely settled anything. We were growing, but it never felt like we were in control of the growth.

What we were missing was not talent or effort. It was a system. The Entrepreneurial Operating System would have given us:

• One written vision that the whole leadership team agreed on
• An Accountability Chart that made it clear who owned what
• A weekly Scorecard, so we saw problems coming instead of reacting to them
• 90-day Rocks, so we focused on a few things at a time and actually finished them
• A weekly meeting that solved issues instead of circling them

I found EOS after I sold the business. That is a big part of why I do this work now. I know exactly what it would have saved us.

2. Pay for performance, not for showing up

Like most owners, I paid bonuses. And like most owners, I watched them turn into something everyone expected rather than something anyone earned.

When a bonus shows up at the same time every year, in roughly the same amount, regardless of results, it stops being an incentive. It becomes part of the salary. Worse, the year you can't pay it, it feels like a pay cut.

What I would do instead is a no-entitlement incentive plan: a self-funded plan tied to profit and to the numbers each person can actually influence. When people can see how their work moves the business, they start thinking like owners. That is the idea behind ProfitWorks, and it is the second thing I wish I had put in place decades earlier.

3. Build a real path for your best people to become partners

The people you most want to keep are the ones with the most options. If they can't see a future inside your company, they will eventually build one somewhere else.

I wish I had created a clear, structured path to ownership: what it takes to get there, how performance is measured along the way, and what being a partner actually means. Not a vague promise. A defined pathway.

Law firms have a head start here, because most already have some version of a partner track. But in many firms I work with, the criteria are unclear, the timeline shifts, and the decision depends more on politics than on performance. Your best associates notice.

Why I share this

Experience is a great teacher. It is also an expensive one. My goal now is to help founders and managing partners learn these lessons years earlier than I did, while they still have time to put them to work.

If any of these three sound familiar, that is usually the place to start.

This article grew out of a post on LinkedIn. Follow me there for new ones each week.