Dear Entrepreneur, You Need To Pause & That’s OK!
In the world of business, we can easily convince ourselves that activity equals productivity, but is that true?
The world has slowed down in the past few months under the strain and chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic. With businesses shut or shrunk down, children at home and families trying to re-learn how to live together, we’ve all been forced into an extended, suspended pause.
For entrepreneurs, this period has been heartbreaking. The reality is that, even though the pandemic is not anyone’s fault or anyone’s burden to fix, within the world of business, the buck still stops with you- the leader. All eyes look to you at the end of the month, and that kind of uncertainty can be unnerving.
Over the last few years, I have dedicated my time to working with businesses across different industries in Kenya and coaching entrepreneurs on how best to understand themselves, their businesses and their path for growth. So as you can imagine, the beginning of the pandemic saw my phone flush with notifications and calls from entrepreneurs trying to figure out what this period would mean for their business and the different ways in which they could “pivot” and adapt to this level of uncertainty.
One specific entrepreneur who runs a successful catering business called me in a panic because she was getting cancellations and it felt like the business she had grown through blood, sweat and tears was now on the brink of shutting down. She called me to sound off the idea of diversifying into a food delivery business since that felt like the natural direction all the food catering companies were going. Furthermore, her competition had already begun to offer delivery services based on the assumption that high sales would be fueled by the fact that people were staying at home and ordering in.
It seemed lucrative, and it felt like a leap she should make, so she wanted to know if I thought that would be a good idea.
There is a thing that happens to us as humans when we feel like our backs are against the wall. We panic. We jump, and we put ourselves in a desperate situation where we normalize an “any-options” mentality. Sometimes it is a hit, but unfortunately, this sometimes sends businesses into a spiral where they lose control of their vision and the initial why.
When your back is firmly against the wall, maybe the best thing you could do is pause.
The “power of the pause” is often used in public-speaking to describe the kind of intentional silence that centers the focus of the audiences and emphasizes the next thought the speaker expresses. I think we can harness some of these learnings for the world of business.
We run away from pauses because they make us feel like we’re not in control. We run away from them because they open us up and make us vulnerable. We run from them because we have drummed into our minds the ideology of no work, no food. Sometimes we run simply because running feels like at least we’re doing something and we wouldn’t be blamed if it all crumbled. They would say that we fought till the last breath.
The truth is, however, that most businesses don’t know which fight is worth fighting. At that point, until you are convinced that this is where your business should go, a pause is more valuable than making the situation worse.
Pivots require investment, and not only in this new business operation, but even in yourself as the entrepreneur to learn and relearn this whole new business world. Pivots require a lot of thought and reflection to be able to make critical decisions about the future of the business. That clarity and decisiveness can only come out of a pause. A season where you stop, quieten the noise around you as an entrepreneur and truly dig into the real why and what you want to achieve through your business.
If you can find that still, silent why,even in that storm, then that is your reason. The thing that you can fight for and fight towards. If you genuinely believe that necessity is the mother of invention, then you know that it is in tough times that the best ideas are born. Even when everything seems to be crumbling around the world, Bezos still hit 200 billion dollars (net worth) this year! Which is an ode to the fact that not everything has to burn to the ground, and there is success to be found in the most hopeless situations.
So why not just take that pause? Take that time to do the work that might save your business? Take that time to reevaluate, to read and learn about your industry better. Take that time to find the inspiration to continue. Take the time to find the direction. There is nothing as important as acting on a well-thought-through plan, and those plans are the creative result of intentionality and time. Creativity, though we have learnt to abuse it, is not a diamond, it is a flower. It blooms not under pressure but in a well-watered, well-nurtured environment. Creativity feeds into innovation, and that ensures that you can continue to reinvent yourself through the tides.
Bezos’ reasserting himself as the wealthiest man alive feels very similar to what Rockefeller went through in 1890. At the time, Rockefeller was the richest man in the world, and he had made a fortune through the monopolization of the oil industry. He owned oil refineries across the US. His company Standard Oil was the primary supplier of kerosene. His kerosene lit up the nation! As you can imagine, that was the height of innovation, and he worked hard to ensure that he was comfortable in that space. However, the invention of commercially viable electricity posed a threat to his empire. Edison had just invented the light bulb and seemed to be sweeping up the lighting industry with this new safe and affordable source of light and power.
Around the country, those rooting to destabilize Rockefeller from his position of wealth laughed hard at this development because it seemed that the mighty Goliath was about to take a tumble. I assume that at that point, it would have been easy for Rockefeller to jump onto the electricity wagon. To shut down his refineries and find a way to compete with Edison and Tesla on powering America. Instead, he embraced that pause. He stopped, and in dialing back into his business, he realized that there had been something that he didn’t quite understand and remained unsettled about the business. He was never okay with how much product went to waste. He thought that the excess product that was usually thrown away could be used for something better. He invested in scientists and tasked them with finding a use for this volatile and powerful by-product of kerosene called gasoline. In no time, they were using gasoline to power the engines of factory machinery, and soon enough they were supplying this as fuel for Ford’s then-popular Model Ts. Gasoline went on to become even more prominent than kerosene ever was.
That was a pivot and a half. That was a pivot that was anchored by intentionality and thought and process. Not by anxiety and the need to follow the curve. It is that kind of pivot that ensures that you are on the cutting edge even if and when things settle.
So what was my advice to the catering entrepreneur? Well, I told her to pause. To not feel guilty about the pause, but to use it. To ensure that the kind of clarity and thought put into her business radiates her newfound energy and to find every way to build her reflective capacity up to the point where she can extract all the useful lessons from that season. The truth is that we need to learn how to pause and sit in a space alone by ourselves and listen.
You need to pause, and that is okay!
