Be more tortoise

Have you noticed how entrepreneurs are urged to take a leap of faith, battle competitors and shake things up?  We run businesses from accelerators.  We’re to fail fast, move fast and break things. 

Throughout the 30-year media sample underpinning The Entrepreneurial Myth, the image of the entrepreneur is always as proactive pursuer, aggressor and hunter.  Never the object of action, never the farmer.  You are perhaps so used to seeing the entrepreneur fizzing with agency and energy, the title ‘reflective entrepreneur’ seems an oxymoron.  There is something suspicious about a quietly contemplative entrepreneur, something of the night.  A small business with limited growth is classed a lifestyle business, somehow not the real deal.  Real entrepreneurship is supposed to be big and brash, fast and furious.  Hunters rule!

But remember the tortoise and hare?  Hare’s frenzied arrogance slows him down; tortoise’s steady consistency wins the race.  Aesop’s fable taught childhood lessons of ‘more haste, less speed’.  It could be that way with business.

Take inspiration from the Olympian coach I met recently with an incredible business mission stretching all the way to 2060. Or Jon Geldart’s 100-year vision for the Institute of Directors. The wheels of business mustn’t grind to a halt.  Of course. Quick decisions are needed; snap judgments work. 

But in a sector where more than 90% of start-ups fail, the question remains: what if a more contemplative and careful approach refined decision making and saved the business?  Business churn is the rate at which businesses are created, fold into insolvency, and new businesses take their place.  Again and again, over and over, never quite scaling successfully. 

What if reflection and clarity slowed business churn in a significant proportion of cases?    

This is controversial.  A pure economic lens tolerates and promotes business churn.  One head of enterprise services once told me: “we can’t rely on existing companies to innovate.  We need a continual flow of new businesses; we should encourage more start-ups to keep the enterprise funnel healthy.  It’s a genetic process of mutation; only some of these mutations will become very successful and create new opportunities for people.  If we stop this process, we’ll lose out.  The right idea might be to churn businesses quicker.  If your first four businesses don’t work but your fifth one does, how quickly can we get you on to your fifth?  Speed is more important than how well I can support you through your first four businesses.”

But this ‘fifth-time lucky’ equation doesn’t include the significant transaction costs of losing a business in an imperfect market.  It also doesn’t seem to account for the unquantifiable personal cost – the mental health challenge of failing and the trauma of losing a business.  Entrepreneurial success currently rests on the wrong metrics, says Davidow and Williams in their book Fail Brilliantly: “the world needs us to be more than just economic units taking cues from a handful of gurus… Our personal journeys have intrinsic value… There are no winners and no losers, just journeyers.”

Slowing the churn of business creation and failure might mitigate hidden heartache.  It might also improve the performance of entrepreneurial markets.  Imagine entrepreneurship takes a breath and you pause amidst the hustle.  Imagine if the means matter as much as the end. 

It is time to slow down, stretch and think; to carefully consider the weight and worth of your next step.