Make “Cheap” Mistakes & Make Mistakes O.K.
There’s a world of difference between failing and simply making mistakes. It’s critical for entrepreneurs to understand and recognize the difference. I hear people talking about how proud they are that their last business or venture failed. They brag about what a wonderful learning experience it was. But it’s all a crock and a waste of breath. Because you only fail when you give up and giving up is something that winners never do. Failing is failing however you paint it and, when you fail, it’s game over. So, in my book, only cretins celebrate their failures.
Making mistakes, on the other hand, is absolutely par for the course and something we all do from time to time. It’s a sign of a healthy, active and risk-taking business. The fact is that the only time normal people don’t make mistakes is when they’re asleep. Mistakes are a critical part of growing and expanding your company and, if you’re not stubbing your toe from time to time, it means you’re not moving fast enough and pushing forward. Skinned knees are part of the process. Rapid growth and constantly changing circumstances are inherently embarrassing – you need to get used to it. A thick skin helps a lot in a start-up because not everything in life is fair.
When I was first starting out several VCs told me that they never invest in businesses founded by lawyers because too many lawyers are more concerned about being “right” than they are about doing the things that are right for the business. They’d rather die than die of embarrassment. But the name of the game is to win, not to be right all the time. Being smart doesn’t mean that you make all good decisions – it means that you learn from your bad ones, don’t repeat them, and make the best that you can out of them.
There are a few basic rules that will help you be just as successful in navigating the valleys you encounter along the way as you are in celebrating the peaks and high points of the journey.
Rule Number 1 – Make Cheap Mistakes (Fail Fast)
Not everything worth doing is worth doing well. You need to start small on new projects and be ready to scale swiftly or abandon ship as soon as the handwriting is on the wall. But be careful about the process –don’t try to do things cheaply that you shouldn’t do at all.
On the other hand, sometimes for a small, start-up company, being smart and cheap is the only way to meet the demands of your customers and to keep up with the competition. Even when the customer’s demands are bullshit. Here’s an example I had from the earliest days of Fed Ex.
We had a relatively new business called kiNexus which was providing thousands of college graduate job seekers’ resumes on CDs to employers on a weekly basis so that they could sort and select interview candidates before they got to campus and often from several schools as well. Many of our actual customers were relatively low level HR people from big corporate employers and their jobs were mainly to schedule and support the “real” recruiters and, as you might imagine, they were insecure, demanding for no good reason and generally pains in the ass. Let’s just say that they had issues.
In any case, around that time, anything in business that was time-sensitive and important was beginning to be sent overnight by Fed Ex and apparently the more Fed Ex packages you got, the more important you felt and appeared to the people sitting around you in your office. So one day in our little business, we started getting regular calls usually on a Thursday afternoon from a number of our customers insisting that they needed their CDs sent overnight Fed Ex (for about $40 a pop at that time) rather than by mail which was costing us 53 cents.
And we started doing it because we wanted to be responsive to our customers even though it was ridiculously expensive and totally unnecessary. And, because we were so conscientious, we’d regularly call the next day to make sure that the package was delivered on time. And guess what we found out? Half the time, the person wasn’t on vacation for the next week or wasn’t even going to be in the office that day. Most of the time, no one else could figure out what was so urgent about the delivery anyway. And generally, we felt like idiots. But the customer is always right – right?
So here’s what we did. We made our own fake Fed Ex envelopes (see below) and we put 75 cents postage on them and sent them regular mail and never had a complaint after that from any of these guys. Ever.
Rule Number 2 – Don’t Be Reluctant to Change Your Mind
Nothing in life is written in stone. If you’re headed in the wrong direction or digging yourself deeper every day in a hole, the first order of business is to stop. Sticking to the original plan when the conditions on the ground have changed is foolish – you’ve got to be fast and flexible. To stick with a mistake is actually much worse than making it because delay only compounds and worsens the situation.
Rule Number 3 - Don’t Dwell on the Past – Move On
It’s always O.K. to admit that you’ve made a mistake. Make ‘em. Admit ‘em. Correct ’em. Forget ‘em. A short memory and some in-game amnesia are critical. If you’re worrying about the past, you’ve got a good chance of screwing up the future. You can’t water yesterday’s crops. So move on.
Rule Number 4 – Distinguish Mistakes from Systemic Problems
The best companies understand the very crucial distinction between mistakes (errors that happen once) and systemic problems (errors that happen over and over again) and they make it their business to track and aggregate these occurrences in order to eliminate the root causes of the problems. Mistakes will always happen, but the same mistakes shouldn’t happen over and over again – those cases aren’t mistakes, they’re addressable problems that can be made to go away.
Rule Number 5 – Be a Big Boy or Girl
Don’t try to hide a mistake or cover it up – admit it and get to fixing it. Show some remorse and make sure that people know you’re taking it seriously. Let the appropriate people know it won’t happen again. Don’t waste your breath blaming others – you’ll need it to say “I’m sorry”. Take your medicine – don’t sulk – just get back to work and get over it. And finally, don’t ruin a good apology with a crappy excuse.
PP: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
