I fired the entrepreneur of myself

For four years after I founded DevBatch, when someone asked me what I did, I would say I run a startup, or I am an entrepreneur. The titles never felt right. They felt hollow.

The Pitafi family is a family of agriculturists. There were lands once. There are not many left, so there are not many landlords. My generation has had to find other ways to make a living. Most of my brothers and cousins are well-educated and are doing nicely on high-profile jobs. Several of them are in media. None of them, in three generations of family I can name, ran a business. There is no DNA for this in my line. I had to build the muscle from scratch.

For the first four years I built the muscle wrong.

I was the entrepreneur who had hired myself to do the job. I wrote the code. I closed the deal. I onboarded the customer. I hired the engineers. I read the contracts. I sent the invoices. I chased the late payments. I was the company. The company was me. When I traveled, the company traveled. When I was sick, the company was sick.

In year five I started reading more about what businessmen actually do, as distinct from what entrepreneurs do. I read Mir Mohammad Ali Khan on this distinction at one point and it landed harder than any operator book I had read up to then. The article said, in essence, that an entrepreneur is someone who runs the work, and a businessman is someone who runs the money.

I fired the entrepreneur of myself.

What this looked like in practice was unglamorous. It looked like sitting down for the first time and reading the bottom line of every project before reading the project’s deliverables. It looked like asking, before any new hire, whether the role would generate revenue or absorb it. It looked like negotiating harder on rates, because every dollar I left on the table was a dollar that did not show up in the company’s account. It looked like saying no to projects I would have said yes to in year three.

The before and after split out roughly like this.

Then, I was tilted toward problems that were not core to the business. Now, I see the bottom line first.

Then, I was mostly clueless on how to pay bills. Now, I know where every cent can be made from and how to invest it.

Then, I looked for professional gratitude. Now, I prefer deals and sales as the unit of progress, even when hiring. I negotiate hard on the way in.

Then, customers and delivery were two separate concerns. Now, they are the same concern, because they are the line that pays everyone else.

Then, I was uncomfortable promoting myself or the company. Now, I am a shameless self-promoter when it serves the business. This essay is partly about me too. I am aware.

The hardest move was the last one in that list, and it took the longest. It is the move that runs against everything an engineer is taught about how to behave in public. Engineers are taught that the work speaks for itself. The work does not speak for itself. The work needs a voice. If the founder will not be that voice, the company will be marketed by whoever is willing to fill the silence, and that is rarely the right person.

I do not think every operator needs to make this transition. Some businesses can be run as ongoing entrepreneurial projects forever. Most cannot. The ones that compound past year five almost always have a moment where the founder fires the entrepreneur of themselves and replaces them with someone whose first question is “where does the money come from.”

The hard part is that the entrepreneur version of you is the version that started the company. They are the reason it exists. Firing them feels like betrayal. It is not. It is succession. The company is now bigger than the personality that founded it, and the personality that founded it has to step aside to let the businessman it can become take over.

DevBatch is sixteen years old this year. The company is mine, the legal entity is in Texas, and the team is in Pakistan. None of that is the work of the entrepreneur I was in 2010. All of it is the work of the businessman I have been trying to be since 2014.

If you are five years into your own services firm and the company still feels like you with a logo on it, this is the move.