Throwing in the towel

Last week I spoke to a group of students who were taking an entrepreneurship course at Middlebury College. Most of the discussion was centered around my book and all of the different boneheaded moves that my business partner and I made during our first start-up experience. I’m usually pretty good at rifling through questions, providing detailed answers and gleaming over the fact that I typically come off as some entrepreneurial guru, when in fact, my experience is really no different than any other entrepreneur out there.

However, one student asked a question that’s been bothering me for the past week, especially given some of the strategic decisions that we’re making here at WhitePages.com.

The question: “Before starting, did you and Kyle (the biz partner) agree on a bailing out point? That is, did you define when you might choose not to keep running the business.”

The answer: “I don’t think Kyle and I ever even considered when, or if, we’d ever bail. We were so confident that our product would sell that the thought of failure never crossed our minds. I guess we probably should have asked that question.”

In that past couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the future direction of WhitePages.com, how we’re going to continue growing the company and what we believe our users truly want to see out of our product. For the most part, we’re talking about entering some pretty cool new areas and markets and that means driving incredible innovation. The student’s question has been playing on my mind since he asked it last week, primarily because it’s a question that we need to ask ourselves at WhitePages.com.

When you embark on new initiatives or new businesses, how do you make sure that you’re not afraid to walk away if things aren’t going so well? I’m a big believer that you’ve got to manage the costs of a new initiative vs. managing for failure. If you try to manage failure, you’ll over analyze and never actually pull the trigger…or worse, you’ll walk away way too early. If you manage the costs, then you won’t be afraid of walking away even if costs are sunk and you’ve already spent countless dollars and resources. Easier said than done though. Lots of emotion, personal attachment, persistence and pride goes into starting new companies and launching new products. But you honestly have to ask yourself when enough may be enough.

My quandary is that had Kyle and I actually managed the costs, we would have probably walked away too soon and never experienced the successes that we did. Failure just wasn’t an option for us. So, do we take the same approach with our innovation efforts at WhitePages.com?

Thoughts, concerns, questions? Feel free to comment.

John
VP, Marketing