Stop Planning, Start Doing

Published on 6th November, 2007 by Stephen Lewis

When it comes to money, particularly my own, I’m naturally cautious. It follows that I’m also a lot more comfortable planning business ideas than I am executing them.

This is hardly surprising, as even really bad ideas can look good on paper, and the ultimate success of any venture is assured for as long as it remains confined to the printed page.

Of course, this is a terrible way to run a business. Execution, even bad execution, is immensely more valuable than the most detailed of plans, or brilliant of ideas.

Unfortunately, you only have to tune into Dragons’ Den each week to see countless businesses and individuals falling into the trap of perpetual planning. Week after week, people arrive in the Den, seeking funding for an idea that has already consumed tens of thousands of pounds. When pressed for details of their target market, most are incapable of demonstrating that it even exists outside of their own personal convictions.

Seeing such follies writ large on the small screen can provide a very necessary reminder of your own business failings, and so it was that shortly after the new series of Dragons’ Den started, we did some new marketing. When I say “we”, I actually mean me; I planned it (of course), wrote it, designed it, set the budget, everything.

It failed miserably. Completely, in fact. Not a single response. This may seem like a rather injudicious confession, given the sort of services that we provide, but I would disagree. Everyone fails from time to time, the important thing is that I failed fast, and I failed cheap. If you’re of an Edisonian mindset, you could even argue that it wasn’t a failure at all – I simply eliminated a piece of marketing that doesn’t work.

Semantics aside, blowing a couple of hundred quid gaining real-world experience from the execution of some new advertising is vastly preferable to spending two hundred grand planning a product no-one will buy.