The Thing About Premature Strategies
1/3 THE STAGE:
If you’re an ordinary start-up or a small business that’s just 1–2 years old with nothing crazy going in, it’s probably really difficult to keep the big ideas for your business out of your head. The tendency to want to temporarily disassociate yourself with the painfully slow process of execution, is real. You perhaps then choose to reside in the thoughts of instant success and ease of life. The stories of companies achieving million dollars in valuation within a short span of time, being the poster boy of entrepreneurship, being looked at as a genius, so on and so forth begin to paint a really good image to you.
All of a sudden, you wake up feeling like a risk taker. You begin to feel that your time to ‘stop playing games’ has arrived and you need to hit it big. You got to show the big boys how it’s done and try something that would be really cool if it worked out. You start looking into some kind of ‘disruption’. For instance, you begin to feel that if you drop the prices of your product by half overnight, the big boys will start losing their business and just like that, your big bold move would serve you the crown that you deserve. Or you maybe begin to approach investors for an idea that’s yet to have its first 1000 customers.
You try out your ‘strategy’, telling yourself that ‘this is how startups work’. You pat yourself for being prompt and decisive because why not and then wait for your crown.
After a bit of waiting, what you actually end up getting is a reality check. In a place where you thought you’d hear the applause that Steve Jobs received while introducing the iPhone, all you hear is the sound of crickets.
One by one, the flaws with your ‘strategy’ begin to weigh in on you and you begin to realize that there was no reason for it have worked out in the first place. You get back to living the reality of managing customer support, scrolling through spreadsheets, with the blunt realization that today was not the day for you to create magic. You realize that you would have to create your business one day at a time.
This blog is about why it’s really just important to take it easy and do the same — execute your business one day at a time and wait for your turn and time. Your chances of success might just increase.
2/3. THE SIMPLIFIED ANALOGY
Let’s simplify the life of a business and the process of building one through this imagery. In the below image, imagine the ‘company’ to be a person that’s currently in the inner most circle and has to travel to the outermost
2.1] The Immediate Control Zone [The Core]:
This is the inner most circle. As the name suggests, it is in the most immediate control of a business owner.
It’s a small circle because there are really just four things you need to get right here:
Founding team
+ Product
+ Essential marketing and sales
+ Mathematically sensible financial structure
= Innermost circle.
Most startups get something or the other wrong here and ultimately reflect a poor business model.
Every business model can be simplified by knowing these 4 components. The effort and thought put by each business owner into each of these components can however vary. Example: great sales and marketing efforts for a poor product, or poor finances of a great product.
If you have the patience to and really want to build a business that lives for a while, get all essentials in your business’s ‘Immediate Control Zone’ right, first.
Even without having a good team, right set and number of products, bare essential presence and strong financial understanding, you’ll feel like it’s time to move past this circle and run far and outward. You’d want to jump, skip and hop all over the place.
However, if you’re an entrepreneur and are reading this, you probably understand the number of times reality has sent you back to this inner circle. Your jumping and hoping served you a broader definition of what’s actually the ‘bare essential’ required in terms of a team, product, sales efforts and financial discipline.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing a few hundred transactions to be a ‘business’ that’s finally set up and ready to take off. They’re not the same.
This zone can also be called as the core as an unstable core is only asking for trouble.
2.2] The Wander Zone
After you have your essentials in place, this is the area you will have to walk into.
The Wander Zone is basically a massive endless area outside the inner most circle. Think Maze Runner but without the maze. Or with it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just really big and really easy to get lost in.
I call this a Wander Zone because companies could be wandering here for the rest of their lives, moving in ‘circles’, sometimes moving closer towards success and sometimes getting pushed back towards their essentials. This is where strategy and decision making is crucial, because of how wide and varied the options before a company are. The idea of what your company’s brand should be, what its priorities are, what it wants to do or not do, is what this area is about
Companies that play it smart, navigate their way out with good decisions, milestones, insane execution and a vision. Your sound ‘vision’ is what you need to prevent yourself from wandering endlessly in this area.
This territory is what your Business Development is about. From strengthening your sales channels to hiring the right employees, every decision you make here could either prolong your stay or shorten it.
Funding can be taken as an example of how some companies shorten their stay in the Wander Zone, where capital and expertise help them find their way out. The problem comes up when some leave the Wander Zone without learning all the business lessons this zone was meant to teach them. You should not have been allowed to pass.
If a poor idea [representative of a poor core], gets funded [which means its half way out of the wander zone], then it’s only bound to enter the Graveyard.
2.3] The Graveyard
This is a transition area between the Wander Zone and the Success Zone.
It’s a graveyard between the two territories because you either wander your way into it if you’ve taken shortcuts, or the Success Zone will reject you out of it, if you don’t perform consistently. Your unstable cores will also begin to show.
It’s where you would find the graves of some of the biggest startups and companies. From WeWork who made it here with an unstable core to companies like Enron okay’ing poor ethics while they were growing through their Wander Zone and then being thrown out of the Success Zone.
What’s interesting about this territory is that in most cases, this zone doesn’t just allow companies to push through it and reach the Success Zone. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a chance to retreat into the Wander Zone and to your Core while you’re still alive.
Even Apple isn’t an exception to this. When the company was close to bankruptcy in 1997 and Steve Jobs made a comeback, his first gift to Apple wasn’t the iPod or iTunes or any other innovation he is known for. His first gift to Apple on returning was a financial restructure. His first few decisions involved getting the core of Apple back in place by cutting down on perks, improving operational cost efficiency, lowering overhead costs and worked on enhancing performance ratios. It was Apple’s retreat to its basics — a story I personally feel should be more popularized. Even Steve Jobs wouldn’t have been able to create the iPod without his company making basic mathematical sense. So that’s that.
2.4] Success Zone
There really isn’t much place here. But the ones that do make it, all have one thing in common.
They all have done their fair share of wandering and have learnt what path they should have taken earlier. This also helps them better identify the path they should be taking in future. This is what most call ‘experience’ and ‘clarity of thought’. Outsiders feel that it comes very easily to successful companies. However, if a company is genuinely successful, it’s because of the long walk through the wilderness.
The strength of a strong business core, clarity achieved in the Wander Zone, and the fear of not being pushed into the Graveyard, makes these companies who they are.
These are indeed the companies we respect and envy at the same. At the face of it, they seem to have it all figured out. They just KNOW what to do, right? Everything about the ideas and execution is a class apart and you just wish you could live a day in their lives, experiencing the success. If for just a day you could know what it’s like to have ‘arrived’, it would probably be the best day in your life.
It’s these companies that make us wonder as to when would our personal struggle of handling customer support and preparing spreadsheets finally come to an end. They make us want to disassociate ourselves with the ground reality of the painfully slow process of executing our ideas and just reside in the thoughts of quick and instant success.
3/3. CONCLUSION
Most startups today are yet to do their fair share of work in the Immediate Control Zone, prematurely run into the Wander Zone, get a few things right and unknowingly wander into the Graveyard only to perpetually believe that they have ‘arrived’ — into the Success Zone.
Your business will sooner or later die if you let your wildest ideas run free and if you spend a lot of resources on executing things without having your essentials in place. Going to war without a gun will be considered brave by only a few. By most standards, it would be considered stupid.
The next time you think of a new cool idea or a ground-breaking strategy, try visualizing which area do you currently belong to, how far are you really trying to shoot and how much of a resource strain is it really. If you’re still in the innermost circle, chances are that it’s most likely to not work out in the long-run and you’re prematurely running into the Wandering Zone.
If you’re in the innermost circle of your company, know that we all, including Steve Jobs, has had to go through the grind of building a company one day at a time. That’s the magic you should choose to create.
Back to preparing spreadsheets.
