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The Rusty Nail

Guest post by: Gary Kliewer

Article Overview: We all hit rusty nails in life and business. How do we avoid them? What is the best protection against them? And how do you respond when you hit them anyway? Your answer to this last question can be life or death and success or failure.

The Rusty Nail

I have a new metaphor and code name for the high prices often paid for seemingly small mistakes. Last weekend, I stepped on a rusty nail. A big, very old, very rusty nail. Yes, I knew the area around the collapsed barn was dangerous; I wore my new boots and good gloves. I was watching my step as I took care of the rattling sheet metal. As I left, however, I did not see the board buried in the grass with the nails straight up. A step three inches to either side and it would not have been a blog topic—or a week of doctor visits, the tetanus booster, and industrial-strength antibiotics.

We all hit rusty nails in life and business. How do we avoid them? What is the best protection against them? And how do you respond when you hit them anyway? Your answer to this last question can be life or death and success or failure.

You can assess most situations. Though by definition emergencies arise unexpectedly, we can know the terrain and have a guide who has been around the field. Turn to business leaders in your niche; most willingly point out the nearly fatal spots they hit before you arrived on the scene. If you are producing a book in support of your business, you can work with a design firm that is aligned with your values and tracks the current technological evolution of the market.

You take reasonable precautions. Safe sex, safe hiking, safe business practices. In business, you can “nail down” good contracts and reliable vendors, though nothing but old fashioned experience will train you to know the best from the marginal. Focus on protecting your efforts with ongoing education, cultivating mentors, gathering collaborators, and building diverse networks.

But you cannot avoid every risk. You can’t always move forward as if crossing a minefield. As an business leader, the only way to be safe is to stop moving—but for an entrepreneur, that’s the most dangerous choice of all. And when you are working to address a social or environmental issue, standing still is just not an option.

With rusty nails, it is only the ones you don’t see that are dangerous. So the key question is, how will you respond when one leaps out of the grass and through your Vibram sole? When that backer backs out, that vendor flakes out, and your budget gives out, do you die, or quit, or run for a nine-to-five job? Do your panic, overreact, and make the situation worse? Or do you administer first aid, consider a measured response, and ask for help?

The publishing field is full of rusty nails for entrepreneurs. I can tell you from painful experience quite a number of them lurk in the grass. The old ones are still out there, like printing too many books in the first run or choosing a distributor that goes bankrupt right after you’ve consigned all your inventory to it. Watch out for that most common misstep: wasted money thrown at an elaborate marketing launch before you have identified your real audience.

Newer dangers surround you, but they may be harder to detect and avoid. Here the most common pitfall may be “saving money” by going with the standard self-publishing route that gets you a book that looks and performs like an amateur self-published job. Keep a weather eye out for unrealistic expectations for eBook editions and time lost on social media without a well-defined strategy to follow.

A week later, it looks like the infection in my foot won’t kill me; in an earlier generation, it may very well have been my inglorious end. To follow the metaphor into business, survival requires reasonable precautions, measured response to emergencies, and knowledge of available technologies. A little extra sleep and time to think with your feet up are both highly recommended, too.

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Article Tags: business risk, publishing risk, risk management



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