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Fail Quickly To Succeed Fast

Written by: Steve Wilkinghoff

Article Overview: Almost every business owner has a continual supply of new ideas. But most of them never follow through on even one of those ideas. It's like they leave what could be the key to their future success locked up in a closet somewhere - never letting it see the light of day. Over the years, my experience has been that business owners are so reluctant to try out their new ideas because they don't have a simple way of testing them in an easy and low-risk manner. They (wrongly) believe that they would need to make significant changes in how their business runs in order to test an idea. And if that idea proves to be less-than-ideal, they are scared they will have hurt their business. But it doesn't have to be that way. They can apply "quick-failing" tactics to easily and safely test new ideas

Fail Quickly To Succeed Fast

Every business owner gets a ton of ideas about things that could dramatically improve their business. It happens almost all the time.

But most business owners don’t actually follow through on those ideas to see if they really would work. Of course, experience tells us that most of the “clever” ideas we come up with won’t turn out to be as great as we thought they would be. And that’s no doubt the main reason that there’s so much reluctance to try new ideas.

Business owners tend to choose the current state (the devil they know) instead of taking risks by making changes.

But what if you try as many ideas as you could come up with, and have minimal risk doing it?

That’s possible by trying to fail quickly.

Why TRY to fail quickly? Because we know most of our great ideas aren’t going to work out. But we don’t know ones will be the failures in advance. We need to try them to find out. And the quicker we can try new ideas and test the results, the quicker we can weed out the failures and leave the “gems” behind.

It’s kind of like failing your way to success.

To do it effectively involves what I call micro-testing. Micro-testing is simply doing a lot of very short, small tests of your ideas. It allows you to know whether an idea is an improvement, or not, without waiting a long time for the results to show up in your financial performance. After all, if the idea doesn’t work out, by the time you see that in your financials, you have spent too much time on the losing idea.

Micro-testing, on the other hand, can return results much quicker. In some cases, you can test an idea, and know whether it’s an improvement or not within a single day. And done properly, you can empower your team to test their ideas just as quickly and safely. It’s like making each team member a business scientist.

Micro-testing is the key to being able to fail quickly, but safely. But doing it takes a lot of work.

First you must spend some time to figure out what exactly drives the ultimate financial results for your business. Next you need to measure the current values of those drivers for your business. Then you need to clearly define what you want the financial performance of your business to be. Once you’ve done that, it’s easy to calculate what the values of those drivers need to be to give you the results you’re looking for.

Try micro-testing in your business. Finally, you can try all those creative ideas you and your team come up with. And you can do it safely and quickly.

Give it a whirl, and start failing your way to more success.

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Article Tags: business owner, business owners, course experience, current state, devil, financial performance, gems, long time, minimal risk, nbsp, no doubt, reluctance, rsquo, single day



Related Forum Posts
Re: 10 Reasons Who Startups Fail & Book Recommendations - Great post,but please edit the headline. I presume it is "10 Reasons Why Startups Fail & Book Recommendation
Re: What inspires you? - Another inspiring thing is which I really likes "Most People Fail because, their dreams are small". Most people like to engage with something or teh other. If they can truly listen to their inner voice and work towards achieving it, then you can see "miracle in action". So, big changes happen, when you think BIG. If you cannot to think BIG, you cannot do BIG things too. Robert
Business magazines - Fast Company is pretty good if you're into technology although it can be very on the edge. Entrepreneur has become one giant advertisement and I cancelled my subscription. Selling Power also has some useful content if you're looking at improving your sales skills / presentations.
Re: Books for Business Owners - Hi DougSchadle, Thanks for sharing your favorite business book with us! A good book I'm reading now is "Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed" by Brian Tracy as it was a birthday gift from a friend. Tracy's book is helpful in identifying what's important in your life and then setting an action plan to achieve it.
Re: Video conference system for families living in different cou - 1) How much will someone pay for the service? 2.1) What costs are involved on the business end? 2.2) What percent on top of that do you think you deserve as profit? 3) How many people will sign up for the service? These three will give you a rough estimate of the value of your idea. use the equation below with respect to the questions above to figure out the value of your idea. ((1 - (2.1 + 2.2)) X 3) You have alread identified major problems for your idea -- you have competition that is free! Computers are easy to hook to televisions, and it is becoming easier at very fast rate. (For free stuff other than skype, look up NetMeeting if you have Windows XP.) The video conferencing systems do a poor job of creating the feel of a physical presence. Even high dollar systems with dedicated internet bandwidth and extremely nice tracking video cameras do a poor job, especially for long distance runs. I have the experienced the disappointing performance of some of these systems on our campus. Video can not recreate the connection felt when in the same room with another person. Step 1, Quickly and roughly calculate the cost of the system you propose. Step 2, Compare that with what you think someone will pay and the cost of your current compeition. Step 3, Go / No-Go.


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