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This is the difference between long-term success and failure
For founders hoping to build a business that will last for decades, the key to unlocking lasting success is to never stop thinking like a startup, according to investor and author Eric Becker.
“It’s a little bit counterintuitive. Most people associate something that lasts over time as becoming bureaucratic, slow-moving, indecisive,” says Becker, co-founder and co-chairman of Cresset Capital, a Chicago-based wealth management firm with more than $70 billion in assets under management. Becker has started or invested in more than 100 companies, he says.
The “long-game companies,” as Becker calls them, are typically “more nimble” than their competitors, which allows them to better navigate the inevitable ups and downs of running a business. Leaders of those companies have to be able to weather difficult stretches while looking ahead to predict shifting markets. Then, they must take decisive action to come up with fresh ideas that can set their companies up for continued success.
Those lasting businesses have “the ability to really see into the future where things are going [and] take action when action is needed,” Becker adds. “They actually are all of the things that you think of in a small, fast-moving startup.”
Resilience becomes part of your company’s DNA
One example of a continuously innovative mindset: The J.M. Smucker Company, Becker writes his book, “The Long Game: A Playbook of the World’s Most Enduring Companies,” which published on Oct. 14.
Founded by an Ohio farmer in 1897, the company has grown from selling apple butter from a horse-drawn wagon to a packaged food operation currently valued at more than $11 billion. It owns brands making everything from jam, coffee and desserts to pet food. One of its current biggest revenue producers is the Uncrustables brand of frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which launched in 1998 and is expected to top $1 billion in annual sales by 2026, the company said in 2024.
“Smucker’s has been able to adapt and tap into consumer needs and market trends, transforming simple concepts into widely recognized and beloved products,” Becker wrote in his book. Like many other large businesses, J.M. Smucker also likely benefits from its scale and resources by using preexisting relationships with retailers to get products into stores across the country.
Still, businesses that can consistently and successfully reinvent themselves show a “level of resiliency [that] becomes part of the DNA of the company,” Becker says.
Some founders and executives are simply too stubborn, or short-sighted, to deviate from a failing strategy before it is too late, Shanaz Hemmati, a veteran of two multibillion-dollar startups, said in October.
“Being able to, or being willing to, change if something is not working, [doing it] very quickly and trying different things,” Hemmati said. “I think that is a big difference between those who do succeed versus those who [do not].”
Confront reality and trust your gut
Becker’s advice for leaders — on how to cultivate and hone the ability to identify potentials issue that need to be addressed — starts with a simple gut-check question: “What am I tolerating but shouldn’t be?”
Regularly asking that question “forces us to confront our reality every day,” which any successful business must do to assess potential pain points that could hurt their business now or on the horizon, he says.
Once you’ve identified pain points, move thoughtfully and decisively to come up with solutions, Becker recommends. That could mean identifying an employee or team that is underperforming and making a plan to move on from them, or recognizing that an antiquated business model that requires new ideas.
Often, identifying a nascent issue before it grows into a much larger problem “starts with this sense that you have that something’s not right,” says Becker, adding: “When I look back at mistakes that I made in business, [in nearly every case] I had a sense in my gut, and I didn’t listen.”
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