How to save your business when you feel like giving up.
TL;DR — You don’t have to be a genius to save your business — but you should probably read this.
People often come to me with questions about entrepreneurship — and I’m always happy to oblige. Usually it’s friends commenting on an idea of mine and jokingly calling me a genius. Other times its people who are in the process of starting a business themselves and just want some helpful advice from someone who has tried it before. One of those times, a friend asked me how to tell if he was being delusional in his entrepreneurial pursuits. He wanted to give up. This question kind of caught me off guard, as I had never really thought of it that way. At what point are you chasing a false dream? Am I a genius or am I delusional?
I thought back to how my latest quest for success started. My co-founder Dan Lopretto and I have been working together for almost two decades. We saw a promotion for a hackathon hosted by Rackspace. The prize was $10,000. We knew we had the ability, we just needed an idea.
That’s when we were out with a colleague for lunch. At the end of our meal, she pulled out her purse to pay. Instead of pulling out money, she pulled out a fist full of crumpled parking tickets and said, “If you make an app where I could pay for parking, I would use it every day.” The idea was born. We got started right away.
300 people entered. We won. We felt like geniuses on top of the world.
Fast forward two years later. We were virtually out of money. We had company after company copied our product. New customers were slow to close. Things felt on the verge of falling apart.
I was doing things that didn’t make sense. The problem was stress, and I wasn’t doing enough to keep myself focused.
I must have looked delusional from the outside looking in. I was convinced I knew what was best for my company, yet I was surrounded by disasters.
In times of stress, I have a habit of forgetting the answers that are sitting right in front of my face. With everyone else talking about “grinding it out and crushing it” I was tempted to continue to strip my gears, but what I really I needed was to adapt. To stop and think. I have a multitude of people that want me to succeed. I just needed to swallow my pride and ask for help. Solicit their advice.
I needed to take look at what I had. My raw materials:
- I had investors. What did they have to say?
- I had clients. What did they want to buy?
- I’m a programmer. Why in the world am I not developing a new product?
- I had a co-founder with a ton of talent. What can we build?
If we had the ability to whip something together in a weekend that earned us $10K, we could get the company back on track. After snapping out of my downward spiral, we were able to build multiple products to increase revenue, attract customers, and interest more investors.
I found out I’m not a genius like all my friends told me. I might have even been delusional. My advice to those of you thinking about giving up is this:
Surround yourself with smart people. Your peers and coworkers need to influence you in a positive way. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.Take stock of what you have available to you, and make something with it. Just to get your creative juices flowing. You hired employees for a reason — leverage your people in a way that compliments their strengths. Finally, don’t neglect your personal life — that will only bring you down further. You need to be able to focus when you get to work, not worry about outside problems.
