Is it time? Reset. Reboot. Restart.

By Scott Sambucci | February 20, 2019

It’s all come to a head. It’s all too much to handle.

Too many “we gotta do this” to-dos on the company project board.

Cramming two more feature requests into the current sprint that’s already behind. Meanwhile, cajoling that one engineer to finish that one damn feature request. Please just put away the f&cking ping-pong paddle and get the code done for QA review.

Booking meetings and figuring out the booth for next month’s big industry conference. Trying to get your outbound up and running. Figuring out LinkedIn ads and the cold email campaigns that were supposed to start last month. The website redesign, case studies and white paper that supposed to be done last year.

The three late stage deals, all waiting on proposals from you. The three proposals you have out, with prospects you can’t get back on the phone, let alone reply to your emails (“Just checking in…”). Let alone the fact that none of them are really in your ideal customers, but you need the revenue.

Those carryover deals from last year all died, and the flow of new leads you expected from your content marketing isn’t happening.

Flying to New York on Tuesday to meet with that hot prospect because they asked you to let you know the next time you’re in town, and you can’t get any other meetings lined up to fill the calendar.

The offer that’s out to your first SDR, but truth be told, you’re not even that excited the candidate.  He seems a little too salesly for you, but you maybe that’s okay, right? Besides, you don’t have another option right now and you need someone leading outbound because you’re already behind pace to hit your 2019 sales targets.

Dealing with that team member that grates on everyone else – that one that’s always good for a snarky comment about the legacy code. You’d fire him if you could, but you’re afraid for the productivity loss and what message it might send to the team.

Does it really need to be this way? I mean, it’s just life as a startup, right? That’s the way it has to be.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Maybe instead you can…

Reset. Reboot. Restart.

Ask yourself: “If I was starting the business today, what would you do differently?”

Image Attribution: Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

• Would we keep running the Google ads and paying that digital agency $3k/month for the few leads either generate?
• Would we spend the $15k for the conference booth, travel and those snazzy full-color product flyers?
• Would we interview more SDR candidates before we made an offer to this one candidate?
• Would we even build half the features we’re supporting right now?
• Would we hire that that caustic engineer again?
• Would we really be selling to these prospects?

So much of our daily work keep on going because they’ve been already going. We ignore sunk costs. We satisfice. We fear what happens if we take something, or someone, away.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You have the chance to start over, and the good news is that when you do, you’re never starting from the beginning. You have knowledge. You have experience. You have all those mistakes you’ve already made. You know what you know, and know what you don’t.

Every time you restart, you start from a stronger foundation on a higher plane with a more intelligent framework. The starting line begins miles down the road from where you first began.

Remember when you first started at the kitchen table, how easy and clear everything seemed?

Talk to customers, write code, release the next version. Repeat.

Maybe it can’t be that gloriously simple again. But it can be much simpler than it is right now.

Simplify to multiply.