As a business owner, you're not simply responsible for leading your organization to profitability. Today, you must serve as visionary, strategist, change agent and statesman, as diplomat, spokesperson, negotiator and cheerleader. This must be done simultaneously while returning outstanding revenues and making sure your company, employees and partners are good corporate citizens in myriad locations around the globe.

It's our belief that pressure to manage for the short term has created many of the problems in industry today. In the past several years, Bob Zaccone and I made a dramatic shift in our focus by creating a future vision. In large part, that shift has enabled us to create and implement a plan that secures a strong future for the entire Graphic Solutions team. Our plan was to remove ourselves from day-to-day business operations and to spend our time on the future.

"OK, so how do we repackage this business while preserving its essence?" you might ask. "Our staff was used to seeing us in meetings and on the front lines. Would this idea be embraced?"

A major shift in many areas occurred and refocus came when we stopped running the business and started running the strategy and the relationships with customers, suppliers and partners that would affect our ultimate long-term success. We decided to concentrate our time looking at business growth from a long-term perspective, and we wanted to find a way to obsolete what we were doing before the industry or our customers and suppliers did it for us.

Today, many companies are selling off businesses they acquired during the M&A mania of the 1990s because they are no longer (or never were) in line with the core strategies of the business. Our goal was to be sure we did not veer off too far from our core competencies—everything we did had to be synergistic. There is an alternative to M&A, and that is strategic partnering. Don't buy the other company; partner with it. You share the return instead of keeping it yourself, but you share the risk and retain precious capital for other purposes. Our staff welcomed the idea, and day-to-day operations were switched to our General Manager and Controller.

Like Bill Gates coming down from the mountain with a 21st century computer "tablet" in his hands, we were looking for that next killer application. We quickly learned that those killer apps aren't so easy to find—they must be created.

We were fortunate enough to have developed some intellectual property as far as printing electronics, and through that ability and an announcement on our Web site, new opportunities surfaced. We received opportunities to work with both suppliers and new customers. Shortly after that, partnerships were formed and trials were made at our facility. This took a lot of time and some serious money, and we spoke to several firms before we found the right partners—those that would actually commit with more than just a promise to work together. It's essential to have not only a firm verbal commitment to the partnership but a financial commitment as well. At this point, our R&D department became key to our future.

To be certain you're aligning yourself with the right partners, you must really understand your business plan, what you are bringing to the table and what the partner has to offer—and of course, what is required of each of you. As we examined every part of the business and took a hard look from a new perspective, we questioned every choice, every customer and every supplier. The mantra became: "Does that add value? Does it align well with our business plan?"

Change is necessary, but change for the sake of change is foolish. A business needs to adapt to new ideas and technologies but it should make every effort to keep the "culture" intact (assuming the culture encouraged the development of the intellectual property that created the opportunities in the first place).

Risk. It's in the bloodstream of every entrepreneur and forward thinking employee who wants to create a career and not just "punch-in at a job." You've got to take big risks if you're seeking big rewards. Just remember that R&D does not mean Rip-Off and Duplicate. You really need to develop your own ideas, or you risk becoming a me-too.