Success Has a Deadline
Patience is a virtue, but in business, it can also be a weakness.
Entrepreneurship is often about finding balance. If you're building a product, it's understanding the number of features you put into a major version to make it newsworthy, versus causing too much confusion. Or, if you're in services, you balance the time you spend with each client so that you maximize your time, but the client doesn't feel ignored.
Opportunities are briefly open doors. If you don't walk through them when they're open, they could shut, and you'll be locked out forever.
The trick is to always be on the lookout for these doors, and to take advantage of proper timing. Those that do this more often than not end up winning in their respective markets.
If You Move Too Slow, You Lose
When I'm working with my clients, I always stress the importance of having a sense of urgency. If they have a good idea, they need to execute. Otherwise, it could be too late (for a variety of factors).
If you move too slowly, your competitor may beat you to the sexy new feature.
Or, you may enter into slower sales months around the holidays, and your message isn't heard.
Or, your competitor has their own release, and they make more noise than you.
I could go on, but the point is that you can only control your timing and nothing else. If you keep waiting, you keep losing future business.
"Never put off today what makes you money tomorrow!"
Money isn't everything, but it's the solution to many issues. Putting off competitive initiatives for too long hurts your ability to grow your business. I think at its core, we understand this as entrepreneurs. But why do we do it?
If you have some level of success already, then a large part of that can be attributed to being in the right place, at the right time. While this sounds like luck (and it is on some level), the reality is that you increased your chances of being in that right place at the right time by the sense of urgency you had in the ideas you implemented.
But then something changed. You got comfortable.
I've been guilty of this, too. It's easy to achieve a comfortable level of success and then slow down too much. Taking a more measured approach is well and good, but it's very easy for this to slip into a form of laziness. You already have predictable income for the business, so you don't need to “rush” anything, and as a result, you miss the timing.
Move Fast, Stay Sharp
If you're reading this, it's probably because, deep down, you know you've been moving a little too slowly. Maybe you've convinced yourself that you're being “strategic” or “waiting for the right moment”, but more often than not, that moment never comes unless you're the one to create it.
Success doesn’t wait around. Neither should you.
The best businesses aren’t just the ones with great ideas, they’re the ones that act on them quickly. So whatever it is you've been sitting on, such as a new offer or campaign, you need to move now! Get it out into the world. Iterate if you must, but don’t wait for perfect.
Because in business, speed doesn't just matter. It wins.