Stuck Entrepreneurs: Escape Routes Out of the Quicksand

The Stuck Entrepreneur’s School of Thinking

I often work with distraught entrepreneurs, baffled and listless to varying degrees. Because I have lived it all, those floundering stuck entrepreneurs are, well, my kind of people.

But there is hope for the stranded businessperson; solutions, safeguards, warning bells, and lifelines to extricate you from the quicksand. That is what Stuck Entrepreneurs delivers.

We all go into business with the highest of expectations and, often, with a preconception that we can do it. Of course we can; this kind of mindset is part of the entrepreneurial starry dream.

We know others who have been successful. We read about them, drool over them. The successful role models all-too-often boast about how they made it. What they often downplay are the quicksand traps they almost succumbed to along their journey.

Quicksand awaits us all. The tough part is not being engulfed, mumbling I should have done something earlier on.

But let’s backtrack.

1. You are dreaming of a business. You have done your homework, and you believe what you want to believe, and ignore the red flags. They don’t apply to you! In short order you find out that they do. You may be good, but you are subject to the same kind of almost insurmountable brick walls others have run into headfirst. You sink into the quicksand and lose your focus as you flail away.

2. Alternatively, you have reached a point in your established business where you are losing customers as quickly, or quicker than you are earning new ones. The struggle means you have to trim your overheads. You cut marketing budgets first. Wrong. The quicksand engulfs you.

3. You have beaten the odds. You have a thriving enterprise and are rightfully proud of your accomplishments. However, complacency also creates a paradox.

•Your rapid growth has made funders and even investors nervous, as rapid growth often does, and growth funds are becoming harder to acquire. You assume they will come around. And they don’t, or do so too cautiously to do you any good.

•Your inventory includes a number of dead-end products that have outlived customers’ needs and demands. They will all eventually sell, right? Well, maybe very discounted, and not quickly enough to generate cash flow.

•Your staff has become complacent, coasting on old laurels, still delivering, but growth has slowed.

•Competitors are stealing market share, and all-the-while your blinders approach refuses to acknowledge that markets are finite. Your base is being peeled away.

•Technology and design have, or are in the process of leapfrogging you, and you have not prepared for this eventuality.

You are, knowingly or unknowingly, in the grips of quicksand, sinking without possibly even knowing it.

Hindsight has often proven herself to be a deflating seductress. A perfect example is the case of a past technology innovation client of mine.

This company invented a gizmo, quite clever, and one that proved to fill a market gap, at that time. Within six months, they went from start-up to revenues of over $10 million per month. The founders’ inflated egos disregarded the counter-intuitive warning signs.

The banks questioned the validity of the revenue numbers and put them on a short lease which restricted their ability to meet massive market opportunities.

The owners became obsessed with rewarding themselves, using valuable cash flow to pay for luxury toys and nouveau-riche mansions.

Instead of continuing new product development, the owners convinced themselves, and them alone, that they had the final word in gizmos. They were so wrong.

Instead of dealing with the forewarning noise, the owners surrounded themselves with buffer footmen who were tasked with dealing with issues well above their pay grades. The owners could not get their now-pristine hands dirty anymore.

Despite my efforts to haul them kicking and screaming into reality, the company went into a fatal tailspin when a competitor created a faster, better, cheaper version of the gizmo that reflected new technology. Quicksand engulfed my client and left no trace, no remains, not even a pair of Lamborghini leather driving gloves emblazoned with What Me Worry?.

Entrepreneurial success demands extreme diligence. Success is not guaranteed. It is earned by those forever aware about everything in their sandbox, and ahead of them, and open to strategic advice delivered gently, and often times less so.

Workbook

1. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where your business was in jeopardy?

•How did you handle it?

•What did you learn from it?

2. Do you have an exit strategy, just in case?

3. Do you consider your business invulnerable?

•If yes, how can you bullet-proof it?

•If no, what are the vulnerabilities you need to be steadfastly diligently track?

4. How do you best handle weak spots in your business armor? What can you do to better cope, personally, with potential quicksand?

5. How far do you think ahead?

6. How often do you act on your own advice? List a few samples and the outcomes.

What’s With This Quicksand Stuff?

Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh’s sad little donkey friend, is a natural tour guide for the quicksand pit so often referred to in this book.

They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.

From pending problems and darkish clouds on the horizon, to being up the creek or, worse yet, heading over the falls, the pathway to the business quicksand is littered with stuck entrepreneurs. Don’t be one of them.

It’s the only cloud in the sky and it’s drizzling, right on me. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

Some quicksand is unavoidable. Did anyone ever imagine that a madman from Russia would turn the world and the global economy on edge? Fundamentals like energy, wheat and grain, supply chains, and other stuff we just take for granted?

The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.

Business itself is never calm, or terribly straightforward and predictable. You need the energy to challenge and change, to plot your own course, and to avoid the avoidable.

I’m not going to do nothing any more. Never again? Well, not so much.

Management by crisis, surrounded by unabated flames, is no way to run a business. You cannot and should not plan or run a business in an agitated state, or a stubborn mindset cemented in outdated thinking. The energy and willpower to recover are far greater that the effort it takes to stay attuned to your market, customers and team.

Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be.

That represents the core of this book; the more I question and prod you, the greater the chances that you can accommodate and welcome change. You will be a happier and more fruitful businessperson, unlike Eeyore.

My eyes are open, but my mind is asleep.

This book is not intended to make light of anyone’s shortcomings. I have plenty of my own flaws to deal with (you should also have met my ex-partner). So, I focus on the potentially fatal behavior, habits, and inactions that can get you in trouble. Stuck, means really stuck.

Finally, experts say that if you stay on course, there is a 78.6 percent greater chance to succeed, and a 46.5 percent chance of reaching your lofty goals. Who are these experts that deliver this kind of bunk? Statistics don’t lie, but liars figure.

You can believe in me. Why? I have been there, having been immersed up to my boys in quicksand more than once. But I escaped, clawed my way out. And learned my lessons. I stay alert and reactive. If you don’t fail sometimes, you will likely never succeed.

And believe in yourself and your ability to recognize the need to change. Forewarned is forearmed.

It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine.

Business storytelling and sharing experiences without preaching or taking any pretentious high ground is important. Just think of me as the somewhat offbeat but perspicacious business mentor. Like if Eeyore had a positive twin.

You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.

Believe it.

Workbook

1. Can you define the events in your business that are leading you to, or have brought you to the quicksand pit?

2. What specific areas are you biggest weaknesses, and why?

3. What remedial action have you taken to extricate yourself?

4. How has that worked out for you? What were the results of your effort?

How Did You Even Wander Into the Quicksand?

I do not make a habit of wandering into a quicksand ambush. I avoid purposely committing an act of entrepreneurial suicide by doing or not doing something I was supposed to do, or not supposed to do. It gets confusing when we blindside ourselves. But follies happen, and there are consequences to be dealt with.

It’s a rude awakening when you have one foot sinking into the sandpit and an expression of what the hell? adorning your brow. Five minutes ago, you were so happy, content with the world, daydreaming about what else you can conquer, and then wham.

We get so distracted and sidetracked by stuff, usually other shiny opportunities or painful issues, that we misstep our way directly into quicksand quagmires. You just find yourself there, sinking. Stuck. Searching for a handhold.

Congrats. You are a Stuck Entrepreneur.

It also begs the question; how did you even wander into this turmoil? Even more important is determining how you did not see it coming, or you did see it looming, but did little to evade it?

Experience has shown these to be the main lapses that lead to perilous quicksand pitfalls.

•Knee-jerk decision making: Simply making decisions too hastily, or without considering all the trickle-down consequences.

•Acting out of convenience: When it is easier just to deal with a matter quickly, without weighing options.

•Pushed into it: Taking action to play catch up with competitors or market shifts you may not have been tracking. Expeditious, yes. Prudent, not always. Stepping into quicksand? Often.

•Complacency: Ego over reason. You are the best at what you do. Your business is the best in the market. You coast, until the footsteps behind you get louder and some degree of panic sets in. Panic ensues. Peril follows closely behind it.

•Greed: This masks any number of pathways into the quicksand. It is a core fault in the greedy businesspersons’ makeup and blindspots. Greed blinds reason.

•Cannot face the truth: Businesses are constantly bombarded with enforced change; markets, demographics, competition, supply chains, technology, and a slew of other impacting challenges. You need to accept change. Burying your head in the sand is not a workable strategy.

•Risk-taking: Taking risks beyond your comfort levels, or your abilities to manage significant risk is a formula for disaster, and a one-way ticket to the depths of the quicksand field. Business does not imply Russian Roulette.

Prevention and preparation are key. Here are some key suggestions that can help you avoid the quicksand pitfalls.

1. Review every aspect of your business and work to identify existing and pending issues that demand mitigating action. Review and update this every month. Keep it current.

2. Set Reaction Triggers, the point at which you realistically must act. Must is the trigger’s principal call to action.

3. For every action, develop a go/no go process. Not every problem needs remediation. Some can simply be dropped instead of attempting circumvention. Don’t ignore them, just get rid of them, period. And that includes nonperforming employees. It sounds heartless, but your survival calls for it.

4. There should be no surprises in your business life. If there are, you need to remove any blinders that shield your line of vision.

5. When faced with a pending trip to the quicksand trap, train yourself to focus on what can I do now and not how come this happened? Don’t waste time pitying yourself. Why me is not a solution. This requires conditioning yourself on how to react to anything thrown at you.

Workbook

1. Do you identify yourself with any of the listed lapses and shortfalls expounded in this chapter? List which ones and try to explain why.

2. Develop a framework for change right here and now.

3. Are you a cyborg? Everyone has flaws. Rethink. Then have another shot at your own lapses and shortfalls.

4. Do you take any awareness/sensitivity training to keep you finely tuned to everything around you? If not, please do so. It will make you a more reactive person in your business and personal life as well. What is out there for you? Contact them now.

5. Have you surrounded yourself with like-minded people who can be your business bodyguards? If not, why not? Think about your areas of shortcoming that can be downloaded to others. What might they be?

6. Who can be a mentor/sounding board for you?

Hitting Closer to Home

If you are reading this book, you are likely stuck, or stumbling toward stuckdom. It’s a dark place, well off the beaten path of successful business. Don’t you want to know why you are here? What punched your ticket? I would.

Just as important is recognizing what got you here, and why you somehow stepped right into chaos, launching the kind of turmoil that can exact a high, sometimes fatal price.

Nobody is predestined to flounder, so was it a serious error in judgment? A flawed decision-making process? A lapse, gaffe, glitch, or miscue? An unanticipated tilt in your world?

You cannot fix things until you recognize why they broke. This discourse is not for whiners and crybabies. Please leave your excuses at the door.

Do you recognize anything about yourself below? Even partially? Be honest. Let’s see if we can get your mojo back on track.

1. You got