3 Growth de-fining moments to be avoided by entrepreneurs and ventures
You were just “Fine” when you started up and then somebody or something came along and De-fined you – has this happened to you?
Young kids are super-courageous, do not know what failure is and are ready to take on the world but as they move ahead in their lives, they get De-fined by their parents, friends, family etc. Entrepreneurs go through a similar journey.
Yes, the De-fining moments are “Conditioning” that we are offered constantly from the environment around.
"What our and their experience tells us is what we or they know, and what our intuition tells us is what we never knew"
You are in the business to do “What you don’t know”, over a period of time the pursuit of “Do what you know” surpasses the original thought process.
It is interesting to understand triggers for individuals to think and act in certain ways. The triggers such as growing risk-averseness, urge to please people or reacting than acting, become part of individual’s subconscious algorithm.
For every venture, there is an individual or group of individuals who are at the center of creating organizational culture, be it right or wrong. The de-fining moments follow through this individual to become an integral part of overall organization's culture.
The De-fining process,
Lowers clarity thereby slows down venture’s response time and agility
Brings forth integrity and transparency issues
Activates the law of repulsion, pushing good things away
So here are the 3 De-fining moments to avoid for an entrepreneur or a venture:
Investor De-fined success: The best way a venture can generate larger value is by delivering it to their customers, and in the effort, they need fine-tuning or a helping hand. When an investor defines execution roadmap for entrepreneurs, businesses may tend to Re-De-fine their goals. This may include an urge to raise more funding, increase the valuation. The equation gets flipped – to grow your business you initially raised funding and now to grow your valuation you might set an execution goal based on de-fined shallow metrics.
Finance De-fined success: What is the role of finance in your organization? By very nature with which finance would work, they are most likely to (de-fine or) con-fine the venture within a risk framework, known at that time. If you are in the business of putting money to work by taking risks, then just do it! Being financially disciplined comes in the way of agility to grow then you are headed towards other extreme.
Customer De-fined success: While customer's voice is good for inclusive growth, expecting to grow by following customer specifications alone may not always be wise. You may end up creating one customer specific captive product or service center. But you would like to do business with many customers. You may incur lots of cost in replicating effort at other customers if you define success criterion based on one or few customers.
data-gr-id="45"Those who can successfully avoid getting De-fined are able to run enterprises with ever young passion and more than anything else they enjoy every moment of what they do.