The Three Components A Business Needs to Make it Last

By Paul Oberschneider

Forget starting with a vision – entrepreneur Paul Oberschneider shares the things a business actually needs to have in place in order to endure.

We’re often taught to start a business with a vision to clarify what we want to achieve and to build something that lasts. But entrepreneur and author Paul Oberschneider believes the vision tends to come later. He argues that a business needs three things to endure: it must solve a problem, survive its founder’s attention, and eventually change hands.

The evolution of my accidental business 

In my experience as an entrepreneur who built an accidental business worth $200 million, a business must do three things to last: solve a problem, survive its founder’s attention, and, eventually, change hands.

It’s also very unlikely you’ll start with a clear-cut vision for your business – that usually comes later. That’s certainly what happened to me.

I went to Estonia in 1991 to explore my ancestry and ended up helping a friend build a bank. I was living in a post-Soviet communal block and wanted to get out, so I bought a flat across the road from the American embassy and set about renovating it.

I made it very good – better than it needed to be by any commercial measure. But because I was building it to live in, rather than to let or sell, there was no commercial measure.

I then showed it to one or two people, and within days the embassy asked whether they could rent it for a price I would never have had the nerve to ask for.

I never moved in.

I remember thinking: well, that was easy. I should do that again. So I did. And again, and again, until we bought our first building of flats. I never moved into any of them.

There was no strategy in any of that. I hadn’t gone to Estonia to buy property – I had gone to look around. The first transaction wasn’t a transaction; it was just somewhere to live. And the reason it made money is precisely that I hadn’t built it to make money.

Seventeen years later, it was a business with 35 offices across six countries and separate operating companies in brokerage, retail, residential development, mortgage lending, and advisory services. I didn’t design that. I arrived at it, one problem at a time.

The literature has it backward

Very few businesses start out with a vision. The vision is usually something you reconstruct afterward. Or, at best, a few years into the thing, when somebody asks you to explain it, the explanation is always tidier than the thing itself.

What actually happens is that you solve the problem in front of you. Solving it puts you in a room you hadn’t been in before, and that room has doors you couldn’t see from outside. You walk through one and solve what you find on the other side.

While this sounds like drifting, it’s not, and the difference matters enormously. Adjacency is not the same as accident. Every door I went through was next to a problem I had just solved. I had apartments, so people began asking me which buildings were worth buying. That became a brokerage. The brokerage meant I saw which sites were mispriced before anyone else did, and I saw tenants coming into the market, which led to development. The developments produced buyers who couldn’t get financing anywhere, which led to a mortgage business. Each line existed because the previous one had created a problem nobody else was positioned to solve.

That isn’t a strategy anyone could have written down at the start, but it isn’t luck either. It’s the compounding of proximity: each step builds on information you own, and your competitors don’t, because you earned it by being in the room.

The Project That Outlasted My Business 

The clearest case I have is also the one I understood least at the time. We’d built what became Estonia’s first luxury hotel, but there was one flaw: nobody comes to a Baltic city in December.

The standard answer was to discount the rooms, which solves nothing – a half-empty hotel at half price is still half-empty. Instead of lowering the price, I created a reason to come: a Christmas market in the old town square.

The hotel filled. That was the whole intention – an occupancy problem, solved. What followed, however, was not intended at all. The market became one of the best in Europe, has run every winter since, and in 2018 the Estonian state awarded me a medal for it.

I no longer own the hotel. The market is still there. This is the point, though it took me a long time to see it. The asset that endured was not the one I built to be an asset – it was the one I built to fix something.

What are the things that make a business last?

First, it solves a problem that doesn’t go away. Shelter doesn’t go away. A reason to visit a cold city in winter doesn’t go away. Permanence comes from the durability of the problem, not the brilliance of the answer, and most failed businesses were elegant solutions to temporary conditions.

The second is that it survives its founder’s attention. Founders resist this because being needed everywhere feels like proof that you built something important. It’s the opposite. Every business of mine that required me in every room grew to exactly the number of rooms I could be in. The parts that lasted had their own managers and momentum – the parts, in other words, that had stopped being about me.

The third is uncomfortable. Lasting usually means changing hands. We sold out in full in early 2008, ahead of the crash. Most of those brands still trade across the Baltics and CEE today, owned by others with better capital and governance than I could have provided. Founders conflate endurance with ownership. They are different things, and the confusion is costly.

The Next Step That’s Rarely Discussed 

I want to say what articles like this usually leave out: I built something that lasted, but I didn’t keep what it paid. After the sale, I went to Argentina, bought two ranches and a house, played high-end polo, and watched most of the capital go. Everything that had made me good at building worked against me when it came to holding speed, conviction, concentration, and backing my own judgment against the room. Preservation rewards hesitation, diversification, and listening to somebody duller than you are. I had thirty years of practice at the first set and none at the second.

Building something that endures and keeping what it earns are two distinct disciplines. So I won’t tell you to start your business with the end in mind or with your ultimate vision. Nobody does, and those who claim they did are describing the story rather than the sequence.

But what I advise you to do, earlier than you think, is to consider what you’ll do when your business becomes an asset someone else might want to own. That’s when you’ll really need a vision, because the window to act is far shorter than it seems, and you’ll only recognize it if you’ve already thought about what you’d like to keep.

About the Author

Paul Oberschneider is an entrepreneur, investor, and author who built Ober-Haus into a six-country real estate business before selling it for more than $200 million. With more than 35 years of international business experience, he now leads Hilltop Capital Partners. Sober since 1986, he is the author of the forthcoming book Coming Clean: Confessions of an Entrepreneur, which explores ambition, addiction, recovery, and the true meaning of success.