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Prepare yourself
I remember learning to ride a motorcycle for the first time, and I remember practicing, holding the motorcycle and getting from point A to point B, and the instructor telling me very clearly that if I look down, the bike is going down. And sure enough, as long as I focus my vision on the point where I was going, I was able to carry and move a massive piece of machinery from point A to point B without any problems. The moment that I looked down, down went the bike. I think the same is true when it comes to failure and success.
We are obsessed and we absolutely fetishize this idea of failing fast. And not only does that keep you focused on the wrong things, but it also keeps you from being creative about all the different strategies that you need to put in place to succeed. The other thing that worries me about the obsession with failing fast is that, where are you going to spend all your energy? The thing that I see that often happens with entrepreneurs or with anybody in business is that you haven’t planned for the best case scenario. You haven’t planned for the windfall when, suddenly, you have millions of orders of this new product that you’re shipping. If you haven’t gone through the exercise of planning for that best case scenario, it’s going to catch you unprepared, and guess what, you’re going to choke. So, I think that that’s one of the fundamental issues that I have with this obsession with failing fast.
The other one that I have is the fact that it doesn’t recognize that there is a whole segment of the population, especially with the shrinking middle class in the United States, that can’t fail fast. They don’t have a savings account, they don’t have reserves. This idea of failing fast and putting everything at risk, whether it’s your company or your job, and thinking you’re going to do fine, you can just start over and figure it out and do it better next time, there is no next time when bankruptcy means you lose absolutely everything. There is no next time when you don’t have family members that can loan you money. There is no next time when you don’t have those sort of safety nets and trust funds and 401(k)s. And guess what? Most people don’t have those things.
Prepare your organization
A concrete example of somebody who’s in fail fast mode versus plan for success, right, you might go about spending a lot of energy buying insurance and thinking of all the different ways that you have to plan for a rainy day, not bad things, but you haven’t built, say, the vendor relationships for what happens when you have to double production, because you’ve been so focused on what happens if the business doesn’t thrive, “What happens if I don’t suddenly double my sales? What happens if I don’t get that massive order? How do I continue to pay the bills?” It’s equally bad if you suddenly quadruple your production and you haven’t planned ahead. And so, what I think needs to happen is that people, in thinking about what success looks like, you need to be building those partnerships. You need to be doing those things that allow you to leap frog without necessarily having, for example, empty storage units in your company because you’re waiting for that massive order to come in.
Partner with somebody. Tell them that you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen with your production, but you really hope that a windfall comes and would they be ready to partner with you in the event that it does. Those are the sorts of happy scenarios that people don’t tend to plan for, and in not doing so, set themselves really up for failure in the event of good things. There’s a woman in New York City who works with entrepreneurs from all over the country that focuses on this problem exactly in the fashion industry. Her stories are always the same kind of plot line. Amazing fashion entrepreneur has developed a new line, has been getting a little bit of traction in the space, or even an entrepreneur within a large organization, developed a whole new product line. Next thing happens is Macy’s, or Barney’s, or one of these big retailers makes a massive order and they choke.
And the brand dies, or the company dies. The number of times that she has told these stories of people who died, not because their company failed, but because their company succeeded too quickly, is just, it’s sad. I’d love the idea of people working with people like OMNI, who, for example, has built an entire incubator that brings in people who are right on the cusp of success and partners them with vendors, with distribution channels, with expert lawyers and people who know how to scale businesses beyond that sort of steady state, middle size, and essentially wraps around people, everything that they could possibly need in the event of a windfall, no matter what industry you work in, whether it’s fashion, whether it’s consumer products, whether it’s services businesses, finding incubators and people like OMNI and TrendSeeder that do essentially the same thing for you. They become guides and they become people who hold your hand through that process of growth.