The business pressure cooker

"You do things when the opportunities come along. I've had periods in my life when I've had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I won't do a damn thing."   -   Warren Buffet.

Often we look at business as a race, and there is a lot of value in looking at Fast Pace as a value, after-all if one is able to turn the inventory faster, complete projects ahead of schedule, or get more customers in a short time there is a terriffic impact on the bottom line. Speed enhances returns and there is no doubt about it. In this coloum I am not focusing on speed as much as haste and the anxiousness to see results.

Imagine you are in the kitchen and put a pressure cooker on. Now what do you do while the food is getting cooked? It is very tempting to open the pressure cooker and stir up things a bit to make things happen faster, but alas; this very anxiety is going to slow things down. Someone once said not to mistake activity with action or results, but we are so tuned to activity as action that we tend to be very active.

There are a lot of things that have to get cooked in business which take time to happen, getting all the ingredients right for a new product is one such example, I for one believe that it is better to go slow and validate a new product at various stages with actual customers than to hurry through. The same thing happens when maturing a business model, a good business model which actually generates positive share holder returns is a rare event, often one can expect more failures than success.

To make a business model work needs the coming together of a lot of factors, customer's acceptance of the product, the team's ability to deliver, systems and processes to make it efficient etc. etc, each of these takes it's own time. There is a learning curve everywhere, and often based on feedback etc. one might have to revisit the basics and build again. The problem with haste is that mistakes tend to get magnified, for instance if a product is not yet optimal, it is better to take time to make it work better than roll the product out and fight many battles to correct the problem. The cost of correcting mistakes is a lot more if you take into account the loss of reputation as well. Sometimes the market may not be ready for your breakthrough technology, it might take years for the market to be ready, then what do you do?

Recently an entrepreneur with exactly this type of story was asked what he would have done differently, and he said that he might not have put so much time and effort into the product and not focused full time on that project. The reason is that his and his partner's time were the most costly in the venture and because of this they wanted to see results very fast, before customers where ready to accept it. This meant that they got burnt out and had to quit the start up and find jobs before they could see results. So if he had to do this again, he might actually have a job or a consulting assignment going in the side to support the cash flows, and do the project part time till it starts seeing some traction.

Of course there is an argument in favour of focus so that one can make things happen etc.. But is there not a better way to use time than opening up the pressure cooker? If you go back into the early stages of startups you will often see that a lot of successful startups were part-time efforts, for instance Ray Krock of McDonalds, had an existing MilkShake Mixer business which he continued till long after he got involved with franchising McDonalds, Paul Allen one of the founders of Apple built the first Mac computers in his spare time, while he was working. Micheal Dell, Larry Page & Sergey Brin of Google were all  students when they were working on their startups. So the argument that a startup needs full time focus may not completely hold true. A better way to look at it is; what is it that is required for the startup at a given point of time and ensure that the right talent and resources are made available to it, often it might not be undivided attention of the founders. Today the way fantastic software can be created with part time effort in the open source world points to another interesting fact that a few hours of the right talent over a period of time can actually create wonders, but more on that some other time. One thing that is clear is that Business like Food takes its own time to cook, one needs to wait for the whistle to go to the next step.

So what do we do in the meanwhile? While we wait? One could focus on other aspects of the business, or take up some other activity to get in cash flows, (cook some other dish) or strengthen systems etc. so one is ready for the next step. The key to remember is that just throwing time and resources on a problem will not necessarily bring about the right results, on the contrary the expected return on investment would only increase, and the time to deliver will also shrink making the project that much more unviable. 

The author is the Chief Catalyst of Businessgyan, His areas of interest are business strategy and innovation. For feedback & more information send mail to thespark@ businessgyan.com