Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Rick Thomas, Founder of First Generation Advisors, LLC., located in Washougal, WA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

First Generation Advisors (FGA) is a business advisory firm focusing on growth strategy, leadership succession, and exit planning. FGA's clients are privately held businesses managed by owner-operators. As the name indicates, FGA's clients are first-generation owners; however, this is a description of the mindset of the owner and not necessarily genealogy.

Being a first-generation owner is about having a founder's mindset and holding the business's needs above the owner's personal desires. FGA works with second or third-generation owners who have first-generation mindsets in how they steward and lead their businesses. FGA serves clients across multiple industries, from manufacturing, distribution, agriculture, and professional service.

Tell us about yourself

I did not start my career in engineering with the intent to be a business owner. Instead, I spent almost twenty years working in manufacturing, focusing on serving clients and helping maintain viability as a US manufacturer in an ever-increasing competitive global industry. It was only after our business was impacted by the outflow of manufacturing jobs in the 1990s to Asia and elsewhere did I become compelled to focus my efforts on developing a strategy that could anticipate and even stay ahead of the risks and threats that SMBs faced.

Since my start as a consultant in 2005, I have advised my clients through numerous challenges and threats to their businesses, helping owners achieve the long-term outcomes they desire, whether it is seeing the next generation assume ownership of the business or achieving a successful exit that creates generational wealth for the family.

While I live vicariously through the successes of my clients, and they motivate my incessant curiosity and desire to help them solve the most complex challenges they face, the most rewarding part of my work is the long-term friendships that come from the client engagements. Behind each successful business is a founder's story and a hero's journey of sacrifice, setbacks, and uncertainty, yet all of it is overcome by passion, conviction, and a vision for a better future. It is these stories and the relationships that feed my passion for the work that I do.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Much like my clients, I faced numerous challenges and obstacles when I started my business. Whether it was the specter of being the sole income earner in a household with a spouse and three children that depended on my success or convincing prospects that my engineering background was a value add to helping solve their problems or being faced with the deepest recession since the 1930s soon after starting (not to mention most recently a global pandemic!).

While overcoming all of these have been significant accomplishments, the one I appreciate most has been overcoming my own impatience with the business responding to my efforts, to allow the momentum built with thousands of small pushes on the flywheel to take hold and multiply. Much like compounding interest, we don't get to realize the benefits of all the small but consistent deposits we make in the investment account until late in the cycle, when the compounding effects of the cumulative balance have their greatest impact. Business is no different, and I am now rewarded with compounded success due to countless investments of effort, sacrifice, and belief over the last sixteen years. The success I am experiencing now is profound and humbling.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

One of my favorite quotes by Guillermo Del Toro is, "optimism is the instinct to inhale while you're suffocating." This comes to mind as of all the things to deal with in the business; uncertainty is one of the most difficult and the most likely to keep the owner lying awake at night wondering how things will work out.

This is when it can feel the most isolating and lonely as an owner as no one else in the business, unless they are also the owner and feel the weight of all that is on the line, can appreciate the burden. Thus, developing the ability to be optimistic in the face of uncertainty is one of the most challenging things to develop, yet profoundly important for their own mental health and the organizational health of their employees.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Develop the routines of discipline you are willing to commit to for the life of the business. For me, it is time for meditation, uninterrupted thinking time (yes, this is very different than meditation), and physical face time with clients. More than anything else, these three disciplines keep me grounded and feed the energy and ideation to keep my business moving forward and evolving.
  2. Seek the company of a peer group - Whether it is a self-facilitated mastermind group of peer business owners or a more structured setting of business professionals available through a variety of pay-to-play executive roundtable groups, get out of your bubble and seek the opportunity to share successes, face plants, and vulnerabilities.
  3. Review and refresh what your definition of success is. Write it down and allow it to evolve as you learn and grow as a business owner.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

There are numerous definitions of business success; the most important one is the one the owner defines for themself. That said, the outcomes of those definitions are often not what they had imagined them to be. The most common and the most lauded incidentally is one that is defined primarily by the financial outcome. Paradoxically, this definition is often the least fulfilling in the long term, no matter the digits and commas before the decimal point.

I have seen numerous business exits that achieved life-changing money for the owners, and yet when the excitement of exit and payoff has subsided, much like a cotton candy binge at the county fair, the negative effects of the sugar crash are the result. Depression, anxiety, and even paranoia are common challenges for the owner's post-exit experience. The opportunity, however, is that business also offers the opportunity to overcome these outcomes as the business is a reflection of its ownership, and one can learn from it.

But it takes a willingness to continually ask deep and seemingly unanswerable questions about what that reflection has to say about the owners and identity, purpose, and ultimately how all of that informs what fulfillment looks like beyond financial remuneration. This, in my opinion, is the ultimate summit for the owner, to transcend the exit and experience a life of meaning and purpose beyond the business.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.firstgenadvisors.net/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/1stgenadvisors/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/1stgenadvisors
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpiercethomas/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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