Here’s the thing.
You have that one goal for your startup, right? In many cases you have more than 1 but there’s always that one big one.
As you slug along and go through the up and down journey with your startup and as an entrepreneur to reach that one goal, you’ll come to a point that you’d start asking yourself if you are doing the right thing.
You’ll start to doubt yourself and what you are doing. Are you leading the company in the right direction?
You’ll start reading books, articles and stuff that talk about Pivots.
You’ll think that it’s the only right thing to do because it’s mentioned by all the popular bloggers and founders.
SURE! Pivots are great and people do it all the time… but do you really need it or do you need to suck it up and persevere?
What is the right way? Well, just take a look at your current process and your data. Do you stay the course or not? It’s that simple.
In many cases, you’ll discover that you just need to stay the course and that you just need to improve your processes.
But why did you start doubting yourself in the first place?
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Well, it starts with your 1 goal and the process (or the lack thereof) you use to reach it.
By not having the right processes in place, founders will start to doubt what they are doing.
Break that goal down and figure out the process needed to achieve that goal.
Your job is to build that process.
Trust the Process Technique (TTP)
I am a big advocate for the 76’ers (allegedly) “tanking” multiple seasons simply because they had a process in place.
It seemed like it wasn’t working to those from the outside looking but they trusted the process and the people.
They broke down the big goal and from year to year, each move they made contributed to what their ultimate target was. It was unprecedented in the sport but it was clearly the right thing as it’s paying off now even though the league stopped them from fully achieving their goal.
How do you get to that 1 goal? You just need to go through 3 steps.
You Break it Down to “Steps” to Reach that 1 Goal
Get your 1 Goal and identify a timeframe and a set of things you need to do during that time frame. It could be milestones that you want to hit that eventually will get you to that 1 goal at the end. Do not underestimate this. Give it some time and flesh it out. Don’t worry, as you go along in your startup journey, you will continue to add to your original list.
Build a Process of how You Will Go from Step to Step
How do you get from Point A to Point B? From Point B to Point C? Come up with a repeatable process that you can do over and over again. This will enable you and your team to be more efficient and accomplish these steps or what I sometimes call as mini-goals. Mini-goals are tasks, a side project, a milestone, a new “release” or whatever.
Track the Performance for each “Step”
Each step has a goal. That means it’s trackable. Track how you are performing in-between “steps” and you also need to track the performance of the mini-goal that you just reached. This is your gauge that lets you know that you are on the right path
That’s how you’ll be able to trust the process using the TTP technique.
Startups will always go through growing pains, everybody will go thru it. Your journey will be full of challenges but having a process in place will keep you confident and aimed at the right direction. Screw everything else.
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Research, Data, or a Story to Support Your Opinion
For my current startup, we started off with just a BIG goal.
We broke it down to multiple steps (a 36 month plan) and then built a simple process that got us from where we are now, to the next step that we need to get to and that has been repeated over and over again, from one step to another.
As I mentioned in one of my other posts, we encountered trouble with tracking analytics and that caused some confusion on our part.
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Do we pivot at this stage? Do we add this feature? Did this feature we add actually make an impact?
We eventually sorted that out little by little and just trusted the process. It’s been going well and with a process in place, we can easily build out smaller processes to make the team function more efficiently.
How about vanity metrics? How did we know that we weren’t tracking vanity metrics and instead actionable metrics? The simple answer is to ask a simple question and assign analytics to answer that. If I elaborated on this, it will take me a day to flesh it out in an article. Let’s just say that it’s a topic for another day.
Note: I highly suggest that you check out books such as the Lean Startup, Lean Analytics and Lean or Scaling Lean.
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TL;DR
There are a lot of ways you can modify the TTP technique but before anything else, you need to be extra clear with your goal.
Understand and layout what it takes to get to your goal and build a simple process to get you from point A to point B. Something you can keep on repeating and improve upon.
For each process, you need to fully track them to know that you are moving in the right direction. That’s how you get yourself thru this wild journey of ups and downs.
This is the road less taken and for good reason. Make it your responsibility and your obligation to make sure that you get to where your startup needs to go.
Have you pivoted too early in the past? Let me know in the comments area below or Snap me about it!