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Early entrepreneurs are advised to say "no" if they want to be successful. But if I had taken this advice early in my career, I'd be a network engineer sitting in a chilled 50ºF server room instead of running my own business.
I can understand where this advice comes from. Distraction can be the enemy of progress at an early stage where every idea seems like a good one. But think of starting a business like using a telescope to stargaze. If you're staring into a black void and only looking in that one place, you could be missing an entire galaxy.
The ability to say no is earned — you don't gain that kind of intuition without having said yes a million times.
Entrepreneurs will often tout that their successes are a result of their failures. But a failure is the result of saying yes to the wrong thing. Their success was their ability to acknowledge a failure quickly and move on from it.
These are some of the most important lessons I've learned about how saying yes can shape your success as a founder.
Related: The 6 Questions I Ask Before I Say 'Yes' to Anything
Discovering your superpower
It's likely you're starting a business because you're familiar with a product, market or service and think you can do better. Whatever the case may be, you're probably learning that starting a business involves doing a lot more than you anticipated. Optimizing your taxes, creating budgets, identifying marketing opportunities, customer support and the list goes on.
In the beginning, starting a business means saying yes to doing most of these things by yourself. When you start doing all of them, you'll quickly be overwhelmed, but you'll discover what I call the three pillars of professional growth:
- What are you good at doing?
- What's most important for operating your business?
- What's most important for keeping your customers happy?
Winding up with too many things to do without enough time to do them is often the first failure a business owner encounters. But it's an essential lesson to learn. I believe early founders should say yes, take everything on and discover what's working using the three pillars of growth. The answers to the three pillar questions should help you determine:
- Where your individual focus should be
- Who you should hire to replace you in your weakest areas
- What projects you should be working on
Saying no early will blind you to your limits and your potential. Saying yes will get your business operating at maximum efficiency sooner.
Related: 3 Overlooked, Everyday Solutions That Actually Drive Long-Term Success
Finding your people
I'm a staunch advocate for the "fake it til you make it," adage, but I think the extended, albeit less succinct version of that is, "collaborate with others and crowdsource ideas until you figure out what you're doing." As an entrepreneur, you can't do everything by yourself. The joy of my professional career so far has been working with my business partners. And I wouldn't have found them without saying "yes."
I majored in computer networking in college and during an internship my junior year, my boss asked if I could build a website for his friend's business. I said yes. In reality, I had no idea how to build a website. But I asked some people I knew to help and together, we figured it out. I knew they were more competent than I was, and asking for help not only led to a better outcome for the project, but it allowed us to discover our individual superpowers. Not only would our performance determine the project's outcome, but a poor performance would be letting the rest of the group down. There was no room for ego.
My friends and I quickly realized that we knew a lot of people who wanted websites built or needed some kind of technical support, so we began charging them to build their ideas. From there, our business, which didn't intentionally start out as a business, began to grow. We were pushing each other to be better and learning about ourselves faster.
By the end of that first year, we had made over $1 million.
Finding your niche
Around this time, in addition to running our web services company, my co-founders and I were also developing new products in the hopes of generating passive revenue for the business — borrowing a model from the popular 37Signals and their success with Basecamp. Our singular goal was to figure out how to say yes to new ideas and new potential. We built and launched over eight products in the span of two years.
After seven failures, we had reached our limit — trying to do too much at once was risking the foundation of our business. That is until we were asked to pitch one of our products at an investor conference. Again, I felt unequipped and a little too burnt out for the opportunity at hand, but my co-founders and I said yes anyway. We quickly got to work, each of us using our area of expertise to finalize the first version of the product and craft a pitch.
We secured funding from that conference and went on to start our first product business. I said yes to all of these opportunities because I knew I had people who would support me throughout the process. I wouldn't be where I am today without saying yes, and I wouldn't have been able to say yes without them.
Related: Why You Should Say 'Yes' More
Finding your fit
A lot of founders get so wrapped up in their initial vision for a product that they become blind to hard evidence that something isn't working.
When part of your business isn't working, whether it's the underlying technology, the product design or how it's being marketed, it's important to know when to pivot. If YouTube's co-founders hadn't been willing to pivot, today they would be an online dating service rather than one of the most valuable media companies in the world.
Interestingly, we helped one of our clients start a video dating app a few years ago, aiming to be a direct competitor to Tinder. A few years in, we realized that the majority of their users were also spending a lot of additional money on matchmaking services. We saw a huge opportunity to provide a digital matchmaking service to their existing user base and attract even more customers. As a result, they pivoted. They're able to charge more for this additional service and they reached profitability sooner because they changed course.
Remember, the privilege of saying no is earned. Success hinges on your ability to acknowledge a failure quickly, move on from it and double down on the things that work for you.
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