One time when making the decision to start a new business I decided much quicker than when things went awry and I had to decide to shut it down. In the beginning you are pumped up with enthusiasm. You feel unstoppable. But when things don’t work out and you know you have to decide to close your start-up it can take long to make up your mind.
How quick are you to make decisions that are critical to your business?
Starting a small venture means that you need to sell it to yourself first. You need to be convinced that what you are going into makes sense and has upside for you. Convincing yourself that you are going into the right thing is important because later on you will need to convince others to climb aboard and support you in whatever form it may take.
Making a decision to start something takes a lot of homework. You need to research your niche market to determine demand, know how you are going to best distribute your product or service, think carefully about your marketing and promotion and prepare a business plan that realistically assesses and projects your potential. Each one of these facets or factors requires that you make an informed decision. Although there are various decision making tools and some of them are helpful, deciding whether to go into something of your own or start something from scratch requires you to make a judgement call. You are not going to get every one right but you try to aim for doing your best with the bigger decisions that are more critical to the success of your business.
What happens when things go wrong because of the decisions that you’ve made? In most cases unless you are locked into something like a lease or a capital purchase, you can self correct as you go along. Much like a guided missile reaches its target after a series of “mistakes” you change course to reach your vision or in goal. Errors are as much part of every day living as breathing. You can’t beat yourself up just because you may have made a mistake.
It’s much harder to close a small business when you’ve put so much into it. Your ego is riding on its success. Your self-esteem and self-confidence can take a battering. It wasn’t easy to shut down that small start-up business but eventually figuring out that the distribution model was not workable I was faced with the unpleasant task. Yet you’ve got to make a decision because you can’t throw good money after bad.
Sometimes you make decisions with the best intentions. But you can’t predict everything. The marketplace is too dynamic to anticipate everything. A competitor, for example, may decide to launch down the road from you or introduce a similar online business as you have. What are you going to do about it? You can’t decide to give up until you have gone back to the drawing board and worked out what actions you can take to strengthen your own positioning and better look after your customers. The sooner you find an opportunity in adversity, the faster you will be able to recover and make the most of the hand that you are dealt.
If you are still dithering about whether to start something of your own, you may want to consider “Breakthrough Ideas”.
Our regrets come from not deciding fast enough and looking back at how many months or years we may have lost by not making a decision sooner.
Here’s the link again: https://ideaaccelerator.co.za/books/
