When you come to a fork in the road....

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work” Thomas Edison

“Be nimble”. “Focus or Falter”. “Opportunity knocks”. “Distractions kill”.

Mixed messages? You bet.

But if you’re going to run a successful, profitable, market-driven company you’d better get used to dealing with such dilemmas. After all, your customers want you to pay them homage by plugging in every feature they think of as they use your product. Prospects want everything (and more) that your competitor is telling them they have. Market analysts are telling you you’re going to miss the “next great thing” if you don’t give your strategy a total make over. Your investors want profits. Your employees want bonuses. You just want that gnawing in your stomach to cease.

What to do?

It’s imperative in a start up, and for that matter at any stage, to have clear and communicated objectives. Along any road you’re going to find new discoveries, opinions, criticisms, afterthoughts, doubts, moments of clarity and epiphanies. Any one of them could lead you riches or to doom. But, if you’ve identified your market opportunity, done your research and plotted your course based upon research and consensus rather than hope and guts you’ll better be able to determine which things that lie along the road to success are opportunities and which are land mines.

In other words, when you come to that fork in the road…you’ll take it.

No "do over's"

“How can you ever get better at golf if you don’t cheat?” Larry Loehrke

We all love “do over’s”. In golf they’re called a Mulligan. Hit a bad shot; take another one without counting the first. It’s harmless, just a little extra practice.

A “do over” in business though is not harmless, they’re costly. Sometimes the situation that causes the “do over” can’t be prevented because market conditions change, new competitors spring up, temporal events happen, opportunity knocks. But many times a “do over” is necessary because of mistakes, bad decisions or rash actions. And these can and should be controlled in order to cut down on the number of times you have to use a “do over”.

I once worked at a place where doing things over became an art form. The founder was always in such a hurry to get to a decision that critical facts were ignored, necessary research was squashed and round table discussions were scorned. So, we ended up rushing out with half-baked products that couldn’t stand up to the stress of production and weren’t robust enough to stand up to the competition. It seemed like we always had time to do things a second (and third) time but never time to do it once.

Now, the antithesis of this is the good ol’ paralysis by analysis where everything is researched, engineered and developed until there’s nothing left but dust. But that’s another topic for another day.

Somewhere between always having time to do things a second, third and fourth time (but never time to do it properly in the first place) and becoming jaw-locked is the magic. But it's hard because it takes someone with enough juice to battle through the "visionary", the "screamer", the "nay-sayer", the "professor" and the "consultant".

If this person is you then go in armed with a lot a facts and and pile of guts.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live” Douglas Adams

One of the books in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series – and subsequently a song in the movie – is titled So long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It represents a message from the dolphins who vacate the planet Earth just before its demolished. The books are really worth reading (or rereading) for no other reason than to be able to know what “The Ultimate Answer” is. But, my mission isn’t to sell more books for Mr. Adams it’s to try to make a point.

So, how can you be more like the dolphins and know how long to enjoy the fish but get out before everything blows up? This used to be primarily a problem in startups but anymore it’s just as important to figure out in big and what used to be “safe” companies.

Simon says: Take one giant step back. Back away from the Job and To Do lists and Friends and Loyalties and Paychecks (fish) and Upside Potential. Analyze your current situation the same as you would if you were first looking to go to work there, or better yet, if you were looking to invest in the opportunity.

What’s critical is to be totally honest. We all tend to see too much of both the good and the bad depending on mood and circumstance, thus the giant step backwards, for perspective.

Ask these questions:

How healthy is the company?
Is it growing?
Is it profitable?
Does it respect its customers?
Does it respect its employees?
Does it do “the right thing” (See Herb Greenberg article on MarketWatch http://www.marketwatch.com/ 10/28/07)

How healthy is your job?
How do you rate your productivity?
How do you rate your value?
Are you generally happy?
Do you recruit friends to your company for their benefit? (As opposed to yours so you’ll have a bigger support group).
When you get a call from a recruiter do you immediately think of people in your network or yourself?

Final question: In doing a good, old fashion sniff test how do the fish smell?