Sometimes it is Just Time to Pull the Trigger

There are many really good business opportunities that never make it past paper. Would-be entrepreneurs agonize over every detail of their plan to the point that it never gets off the ground, or they miss their window of opportunity.
One of the virtues that Mike Naughton and I are writing about in our new book The Good Entrepreneur is prudence, which entails being good stewards of the resources we have at our disposal. Entrepreneurs who agonize over getting started are often concerned with being good stewards of their own resources they plan to put into their business and of the resources they will get from friends, family, other investors, and creditors.
But there are two critical errors that one can make when looking at how the entrepreneur manages their resources. One error is being careless, reckless and wasteful with resources. In this case the entrepreneur spends money without thought often on things that will do little to create sales and grow the business. For example, they lease expensive space or build huge and opulent buildings, they pay themselves huge salaries, or they hire more staff all that the business cannot support. They burn the investment on things that will not create a sustainable business within the time that their seed resources will carry them.
However, another error is to not ever put those resources to use. It is like the parable in the Bible of the man who buried the money that was entrusted to him, never putting it to use.
StartupJournal has a case study of Gary Doan and his innovative design for a network router that illustrates this error.

He proudly showed it off at trade shows and to industry reps. Amid the late 1990s tech craze, he raised some $19 million from investors over a couple of years. “We got feedback from all sorts of places, what it should look like and how it should be different,” he recalls. His 70 engineers on staff continued to refine it with every new review. “It most definitely took too long to get out the door.”

I tell entrepreneurs that they often have to be comfortable with a plan that is 80-90% ready. The time it takes to perfect the plan is often time that will keep them from ever getting their business started. Here are some things to keep in mind if you are having trouble “pulling the trigger” to launch your business:
– Your business will most likely not look anything like your plan within six to twelve months. Your plan is a living document, not a blueprint that prescribes every step in detail for the entire life of your new venture. You will learn with each step along the way and that learning should inform and shape your planning as you go.
– You are most likely entering a dynamic market. That is usually what creates the opportunity you are pursuing in the first place. Be ready for what Peter Vaill call the permanent whitewater that you are about to enter. The assumptions you make today in your plan will likely look very different in a few months as your market evolves.
– You can never eliminate all risk and uncertainty, no matter how long you plan. That is part of the game. There will be surprises around every turn. Your success will be determined in how flexible and nimble you are in adjusting to all of these surprises. You cannot plan it all away no matter how hard you try. Entrepreneurship will always have some risk. Plan for as much as you can, and then forge ahead.