Keep Going

Sometimes I think building businesses must be somewhere in my DNA.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I was building ventures before I even knew that’s why I was doing it.

At eight, it was a backyard circus. I organized every kid on the block to perform as animals—and charged admission to a Ronald McDonald Backyard Circus in my own yard.

Later, it was a T-shirt shop in the front of one of my dad’s photo lab buildings. Before I graduated college, I had a cleaning company with ten full-time employees servicing apartment complexes across southeast Michigan.

The businesses changed. The ideas changed. The problems certainly changed.

But the instinct never did.

Years later, I heard the simplest description of that instinct in the movie Robots:

See a need, fill a need.

That’s pretty much how I’ve always looked at business.

See an opportunity. Figure out what could work. Build something around it. Hit a wall. Find another way.

People have asked me how do I know how to build businesses, and I tell them the truth:

I was given permission years ago!

My granny used to repeat it to me over and over: “You can do all things through Christ who gives you the strength and ability.”

My dad, not a church-going man, shortened it and repeated it to my brother and I, over and over again.

“You can do anything!”

And when things got hard, to this very day, my mom whispers in my ear:

“Keep going, kid.”

That’s my fuel.

My granny and my dad are gone now, but I still hear their words, while my mom continues to whisper.

“Keep going kid!”

Over the years I built many different businesses—not just for myself, but for people around me, and then for clients.

So I’ve hit a lot of walls.That’s the part nobody talks about after the business starting making money.

The wall that makes you want to quit. That’s the

wall.

The moment when the venture you built isn’t working. The money isn’t there. The people you counted on didn’t come through. The plan isn’t going according to the “plan”.

That wall when stopping would be the perfectly reasonable choice.

I’ve stood at that wall more than once.

And every time, I’d hear my mother’s words:

Keep going.

Not “forget it do something else.”

Not “it’s ok to quit now, you tried .”

Just a quiet “keep going.”

Which, it turns out, is the only advice that actually works—because the figuring out and the trying harder only happen if you just don’t stop.

So I kept going.

Through the businesses that worked and the ones that didn’t.

Through the ones I built and the ones I rebuilt.

Through forty-plus years of building, advising, repositioning, marketing, and helping other people figure out their businesses.

Looking back now, I can see the thread.

I wasn’t just interested in business.

I was interested in building businesses.

Most people consider the “building of a business” to be the hardest thing ever. And maybe it is.

But I didn’t see it that way—I had this constant urge, almost a need to focus on businesses the way other a kid focused on legos.

Always planning.

Always mind modeling.

Always turning a business, a venture or a need over and over in my mind to see what would or could make it work even better.

I became a silent game I would plan with myself when I wasn’t working on another project. My friend once commented and said, “why can’t you just stay on one business?”

Then one day my son and I were in the car, stuck in traffic.

Not moving. Just us sitting there and I saw a need. To fill the empty sound in the car, I started building the need into a business out loud—the need we’d just seen, the business model, the marketing plan and how it could all work together.

Just talking.

Just for having fun.

Finally frustrated that he can’t move the car through the grind lock and tired of his mom yammering away he says, “Mom, that’s a pretty awesome idea. But do you realize you just sat there and created a whole business for fun of it? It’s like a puzzle to you. Like it’s a game to you. It’s like you’re some kind of architect.”

I laughed.

Then I didn’t.

That was it.

The thing I’d been a little embarrassed about doing—the compulsion to build, to notice, to figure it out whether anyone asked me to or not—my son named it out loud.

I thought maybe I should have been able to just sit in the car and be quiet. But apparently not.

My son made me realize who I was, in fact, an architect.

A Business Architect.

Finally, I had a name for what I’d been doing my whole life.

And that’s the experience qualifies me to build this blog. Not the title. Not a degree. Not a certification.

But the actual building of businesses.

More than forty years of ideas, businesses, problems, mistakes, wins, walls, pivots, and figuring out what to do next.

That’s what Big Ideas on Better Business is about.

The things I’ve learned from a lifetime spent in the middle of businesses—and the things I’m still learning.

The founders who get something off the ground.

The inventors who see something the rest of us don’t yet—and who may not even call themselves founders, because a patent or a prototype isn’t a company.

The CEOs who’ve built it and now have to keep building it.

Different stages. Helping others to get past the very same wall.

If you’re standing at your wall right now—if you’ve got an idea, an invention, an opportunity, or a business challenge you’re trying to figure out—you’re in the right place to follow along.

Maybe building businesses really is somewhere in my DNA, or maybe it is my purpose just as building your inventions or walking out your vision is in you. But don’t feel bad when you just can’t stop thinking about. Keep going.

I actually feel better when I come across a venture that I know could work, and I work to figure out how to build it better.

And when it doesn’t work the first time, well I still hear the same words I’ve heard all my life…keep going.

If you need someone to help you figure out how just how to keep going, be sure and connect with me www.TrisNoH.com.

Sometimes all it takes is another set of eyes to see the way forward.

In the meantime follow the words of my mom and…

Keep going, Kid!

— Tris

ABOUT TRIS NO H

Tris No H is a Business Architect who has been building businesses since she was eight—a backyard circus, a T-shirt shop, and a cleaning company with ten employees before she graduated from college. Four decades later, she still does it for a living and still for fun.

She accepts select fractional executive engagements with founders and companies that need experienced leadership without adding another full-time executive.

She works alongside inventors, founders, CEOs, and leadership teams to turn ideas, inventions, opportunities, and complex business challenges into clear strategies—and then helps put those strategies into motion.

Her work spans business strategy, commercialization, positioning, marketing, growth, and executive leadership.

Sometimes you need an outside perspective. Sometimes you need a strategy. And sometimes you need someone experienced to step in, work alongside you, and help build what's next.

If you have an idea, an invention, an opportunity, or a business challenge you're trying to figure out, let's talk.

CONNECT WITH TRIS →

In the words of her mom… Keep going, Kid!