Learning from my business

Admitting my business is struggling has brought forth some wonderful support and great ideas. I’m sure there are also those who have been horrified and who are now running for the hills, but at least they are doing it quietly so far.

One of our subscribers, Francois wrote us an email

Yes, it’s possible to make a lot of mistakes. Everyone makes them.
But when you learn from them, each mistake will bring you close to the goal you have in mind.

Keeping the focus on the learning has not been easy when sitting with the endless “to fix” list. We’ve been able to maintain some semblance of the illusion of success by creating a business that does some things OK. The overall picture feels like we are bleeding to death through a lot of tiny paper cuts.

Isn’t there an answer out there?

Joel Spolsky has a great column in Inc magazine. This month he is asking How Hard Could it Be? In it he asks Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work) to talk about how start-ups can fail.

“That would be boring,” she told me. “They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks. It has been so painful to face the downfalls, that I have lost sight of working on the business. I’ve been like a deer in the headlights, so paralyzed by not knowing which of the endless things on the list to try that might work, that I haven’t done any of them. I just keep researching options and trying to find someone who can tell me an answer.

Joel also talks about the quest for the stories of the wildly successful and the huge failures

The problem is that trying to copy one company’s model is a fool’s errand. It’s hard to figure out which part of the Starbucks formula made the business a smash hit while so many of its rivals failed. Starbucks’s success is the product of a combination of factors that came together in precisely the right way at precisely the right time. It’s nearly impossible to isolate which one was the most important. You would probably have to look at the hundreds of small coffee chains that didn’t make it big before you stood a chance of seeing what really distinguished Starbucks.

Context is really important. So many of the ideas I gather could be great, but we just don’t have the skills to pull it off. At least in the short term. But I need to stop getting overwhelmed by what we can’t do, and find the nuggets of what we can do and focus on them.

Can we get out of our own way?

Melinda Brennan wrote a post, Destroying the Old to Release the New in response to My Business Has Cracked, She too has let go of a piece of her business, and talked about the birthing of the dream of a business in a particularly poignant way.

Our businesses are so much a part of ourselves. We get pregnant with ideas and hope and possibilities. We gestate and treasure the development phase, we tolerate the uncomfortable and painful processes because of the potential that we know will be birthed in due time. We labour and sweat and push to give birth to this business and create and develop it to be everything we hope for it.

And then sometimes it fails. Dies. Goes under.

It takes our dreams and vision with it. Our self-esteem, our identity was tied up in that business and now it’s gone. Who are we, what is left of us, when so much of our effort has been wasted and misdirected?

One of the curses of being an artist and creative is how my identity gets totally entwined with my work. Intellectually I know it would better serve to step back, but emotionally I find it almost impossible. My head just can’t quite convince my heart to let go.

What can we do?

Our reader Francois went on to suggest we focus on our customers.

So in your case, I’m wondering why your customers have bought your product. Do you know this? And would they recommend it to others or would they buy again? Why? Why not? And to whom? And where those customers using the Internet to look for this product? Or are they looking else where?

This is very easy to find out (if you have customers): ask them (call them, and record the call. Or use mail. Or use a internet survey service). And of course, if you have had customers, but you can’t reach them, then your first priority should be that.

May be you’ll be surprised about the answers.

And this is not like jumping off a cliff at all, and it’s not about crashing. The pilot studies crashes – it’s about the learning. You can only learn from making mistakes.

So you shouldn’t be studying your crashes, you should be studying your market. It’s about getting in touch, it’s about 2 way communication, it’s about listening to the customer, instead of (just) talking to them. And as far as I can tell, that’s something you are able to do well.

I realized I have been terrified to admit to our customers that we are struggling. So I’m not talking with the people who are in the position to help us most. Not that I haven’t talked to customers consistently over the life of the business, I have. I’ve been scared they are going to tell us more things they want that I can’t figure out how to deliver. I’m scared I won’t be what they want.

Sounds like that’s the place to start. Guess I have a topic for this months enewsletter.

Will you walk with us?

We really hope you’ll continue to share stories with us, and offer suggestions and ideas. It has been so helpful to feel the support and know we are not alone walking this path.

You can subscribe to this series by subscribing to the blog by RSS or email. You can also subscribe to our e-newsletter where we usually talk about tips and tricks for using our visual tools, but in the next one we are going to ask our readers for help.

Here are the related blog posts;

My business has cracked (be sure to read the comments, lots of shared wisdom and support)

Analyzing what went wrong