by Jim Harmer
When you have a path before you to achieve a goal, it’s easy to put your head down and miss signs of trouble ahead. That’s what happened to me.
My business began to grow. By the end of the next year, we brought in $234,000. The year after that, we earned $360,000.
I wanted to scale the business up further—because that’s what successful CEOs do, right? The income of $30,000 per month was steady and it provided so much money for my family that we didn’t always know what to spend it on, other than to simply continue saving.
Somehow, the lawyer job still seemed to be the safer route, and I felt fear each day about the business dying out. Perhaps it would have helped me to realize that over 20% of those with a job have experienced a layoff in the previous five years (http://heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/products/uploads/Work_Trends_September_2014_0.pdf), according to the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Having a job may not actually be a more secure source of income than starting a business.
With a large income and no debt, we could have purchased a massive home if we had accepted a mortgage. The temptation was certainly there, but Emily and I have always felt that security for our family was worth more than any amount of financial leverage. We had satisfied our family’s needs through the simple daily action of publishing new content. Now, I was ready to take on the 10% of optimization in the business to hit the next level.
At the beginning of the next year, I sat down with a pen and paper to lay out a growth strategy. I carefully crafted a plan to expand. My business plan had four goals:
1. Expand into areas of the photography market other than just teaching photography.
2. Create three additional online courses.
3. Create a full-fledged video studio to make video production of courses and other videos faster.
4. Hire an additional employee to handle accounting and customer service so I could focus on new growth.
Little did I know that those were literally the four worst possible courses of action I could have taken at that time. Those four line items that seemed like such a solid plan sent us into an unexpected tailspin that nearly brought the company down. I had no idea my plan was a cliff, and I was driving my small business straight for it—as fast as I could.
Business books and podcasts were poisoning me. While I’d benefited greatly for years in learning from them, I began to chase their ideas rather than to be merely inspired by them as I acted on my own. It’s what I’ve come to refer to as “visionary poison.” I would read a book about Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. “They had such vision! When all the rest of the auto industry was stuck in an old mindset, he completely re-envisioned what the automobile could become.” Or “His foresight was incredible! He took complicated devices and made them simple and premium.”
Then I’d walk into work and what would I do? “Dustin! We’re going to design and manufacture our own camera! Look, this is a multibillion-dollar market! The interface on rear LCD screens of cameras still looks like MS-DOS and I think we could do something revolutionary here. We are earning $30,000 a month and have some cash that we could use to create a minimum viable product and launch something on Kickstarter. We’re making a camera!”
A week later, I’d walk in and say, “Dustin! I have a great idea! Creating these videos is taking a long time. What if we invest $20,000 into creating a full-fledged TV studio right here in the office to up our game?”
It was visionary. Frankly, it was entirely possible. But it so diverted us from what had proven successful in the business up to that point that it began to erode our core business. Is it possible for a little upstart to upend the camera business? Of course it’s possible.
So far, I’d flipped the statistics on their head. One out of every five small businesses lasts 20 years. I’d already survived three years, so if I simply kept reinforcing our successes and slowly growing, I could have a fantastic and dependable business. Yet I was chasing after the type of one-in-a-million success that only a few visionaries succeed in. I’d traded one in five for one in a million.
That’s where most business books seem to place their focus—the one-in-a-million shot that actually paid off. The iPhones, Teslas, and search engines that we literally only see once or twice a decade. It’s as if we focused all of the attention in our public schools on raising every kid to be the President of the United States. Of course, it’s awesome to become the president, but it’s such a long shot that it would lead our kids into missing excellent opportunities to be small business owners, computer engineers, florists, accountants, doctors, and businesspeople.
It’s visionary poison. I really admire Elon Musk. He’s an absolutely incredible, visionary CEO and an asset to the world. Yet if I were to try and act like Elon Musk in my business, I guarantee the company would be bankrupt within five years. He has the visionary poison and it has pushed him to take unfathomable risks with his companies over the years, but he has that one-in-a-million ability to pull it off. I think Elon Musk actually is the once-in-a-generation leader who can achieve any vision, but for mere mortals like me, I’ll pass on the visionary poison.
The truth is that small business owners don’t need the one-in-a-million success to be successful. I was earning $30,000 per month as a recent law grad. I have a wonderful wife and at the time I had two children. I owned my home outright and was excited about getting to work every day. I didn’t need to be a visionary. Frankly, I wouldn’t even want that kind of life. Yet the allure of the visionary poison tainted my business objectives.
The fact is that most entrepreneurs will never reach the visionary success of the famous, once-a-decade companies, and the over-attention we give these successes keeps the majority of people from starting a business that could change their lives.
My goals were about expansion when they should have been about reinforcement. Visionaries expand constantly and rarely take time to reinforce. Small business owners who stand the test of time spend most of their efforts in reinforcement. You have identified the actions needed to achieve 90% of the success toward your goal.
When you reach the top of that hill and are ready to optimize the last 10%, ensure first that your optimizations won’t distract you from continuing the 90% actions.
When I was a kid growing up in Hawaii, I built a lot of sandcastles. The trick to building sandcastles is getting the sand wet. If you form up the right consistency of sand and water in a bucket and place it on the castle, it will stick. The sand sticks and so you continue building up and around. Just as you turn your attention to the next part of the castle, you look back to see your work crumbling. Why? Because the spot was not reinforced. Without a sufficiently thick wall, the water drains out and the castle crumbles. Each spot needs to be reinforced before another area can be worked on.
My highly successful small business was a sandcastle, and I couldn’t see it at the time. Revenue had grown nearly every month since the day I started tapping out words on my netbook two years earlier.
Let’s review again my four goals for the year:
1. Expand into areas of the photography market other than just teaching photography.
2. Create three additional online courses.
3. Create a full-fledged video studio to make video production of courses faster.
4. Hire an additional employee to handle accounting and customer service so I could focus on new growth.
Expanding into new areas of photography was the last thing I should have been doing. I didn’t realize how perilous my position in the market was for my core business that would soon be at risk. That goal was tainted with visionary poison.
The next goal was to expand our online course offerings. We had only one course, and I wanted to expand to five online courses. This project would take nearly 100% of our time for five months when we should have focused on diversifying our marketing so we weren’t too reliant on Facebook.
Our one online course for beginning photographers was selling f
or $99. It was bringing in 70% of the company’s revenue. The most logical decision was to create a second online course. We did, and revenue jumped up an additional $12,000 the next month to crest the $40,000 mark. Success! So what did we do that next month? Create another online course! Another jump! Quickly, we had an expansive line of online courses.
Yet the jumps faded. After a few months, revenues landed back at $30,000. One good product plus one more good product does not equal two revenues. We still sold to the same number of customers, but now they had more options for a course that more closely fit their skill level. On top of that, we started getting an onslaught of customer service inquiries asking what course they should choose as they weren’t sure if they were a beginner or intermediate photographer. Customer confusion likely turned many potential customers away.
The excitement we’d generated for the online courses also started to dim. When the month started and we’d announce the new session of the course, we now had to change the marketing. Now, five new courses were opening up. With five times the available open spots in courses, they stopped selling out. The urgency of “this course always sells out within minutes” was removed from our marketing messages.
It took time for me to see what was happening and why our efforts had not resulted in additional revenue. Income was still steady, but I had unknowingly thrown a grenade on our marketing campaign.
Yet we had come so far and created so many great new courses that I couldn’t back down. The thought didn’t even cross my mind to go back to one simple, successful offer and just work on reinforcing it with marketing.
Traffic to the website was holding steady at over 300,000 pageviews per month with great consistency because the articles I’d written in the previous year were still ranking on Google and sending traffic from Pinterest. I stopped writing new content for the website so I could focus on our product offerings, which just weren’t quite selling as I’d hoped. Remember the sandcastle? I was allowing our most important asset—traffic to the website—to dry and crumble as I worked on another area of the sandcastle.
The problem was visionary poison—constantly trying to expand the business instead of spending most of my efforts reinforcing what has proven to work. In an effort to expand, I stopped writing the daily blog posts, which were driving 90% of the results for my business, so I could focus on the 10% of optimizations.
If I had focused on writing more and more content on the website, I could have more and more articles leading people to ImprovePhotography.com and the offering we had. I had already proven tremendous success came from writing more content on the website, so why did the visionary poison in me want to try out new and unproven methods to expand the company?
I was about to pay a price for that lesson.
The dip began. The numbers that had fueled my work energy were now working against it. We dropped to $28,000 a month, $25,000 a month, then $18,000 a month. The blood ran cold through my veins and I couldn’t think about anything else the day I saw that profit and loss statement with $18,000 at the top. Where had my business gone?
My dream was to free my family from the constraints of money, but my old fear was back to haunt me.
What I can clearly see now but did not understand at the time was that courses were being sold to new people we brought in each month. To someone who had followed the website for a year, they had already had dozens of opportunities to sign up for a course and thus our marketing efforts to reach them were unlikely to succeed. I either needed to put a completely different offering in front of them (something other than yet another online course), or I needed to bring in far more new customers to see our offerings. At the same time, I was competing with YouTube, which was becoming more popular with dozens of free videos teaching the very basics of photography that I was teaching in my course.
At the time, however, I had no idea what was wrong. All I knew was sales were down even though we had done so much expansion work.
The dip continued. We pushed our social media posts harder and harder to encourage people to take an online photography class with us, but this became overaggressive and annoying to potential customers—making the decision not to purchase a course firmer in their minds.
One month the revenue hit $16,000 and I was nearly ready to curl up in the fetal position in the corner of the office. I had hired an office manager only five months previous and now I could see that if nothing changed soon, I wouldn’t be able to justify having employees—or paying for that orange carpet.
I saw this all the time with new photographers who dreamed of eventually turning pro. When they first start learning, they take their camera everywhere. They take pictures at the kid’s soccer game, they wake up early while on vacation to learn landscape photography, and they eat up learning the fundamentals of exposure. Then, they decide to optimize.
They decide they need a better camera. They get wrapped up in following the rumors sites to see when the newest model will be released and learn to read MTF charts for finding the sharpest lenses possible. Suddenly, they look up and realize they haven’t picked up a camera in months, and their skills have grown stagnant. Their goal of turning pro is no closer than before they began to optimize.
It was the “good idea” to get a new camera that ruined the progress. You had it in the bag! You were learning the fundamentals and, most importantly, simply taking pictures each day. It was working. If you would have simply stuck to groundhogging your goal, you would be there. Then, once your pictures were at a professional level, you could add some optimizations to help you turn pro without stopping the simple but important act of taking pictures daily.
The same thing is true with every goal. When you design your day and begin groundhogging, you must stop having good ideas. Do not optimize, adjust the plan to match your schedule, change the day to get even faster results, etc. You analyzed what worked for you, identified the effort that would result in the fastest progress, and you’ve been doing it. Stop. Do not add visionary poison into your goal.
In my business, I got 90% of the result by simply writing one new blog post each day to bring new people in the door. Yet I was wasting time creating memes on Facebook to drive engagement, creating multiple courses instead of one great one, being a visionary CEO, building a camera, etc. This visionary poison accumulated so quickly that I looked up one day and realized it had been many months since I’d published a new post on my blog. How could it have happened?
Know that “good ideas” will come to you once you design your day and begin seeing success. Do not listen to Siren’s song. If you change anything as you groundhog your designed day, the plot of the movie will be ruined.
Action Step Seven: Identify the Visionary Poison in Your Path
This step seems so easy. You don’t even need to do anything. You simply have to not do something: just don’t have any good ideas. That’s it. Yet you’ll almost certainly find that this step is more difficult than any other.
You looked at yourself and determined your work energy. You took an initial step to get the fire burning in your bones and then began groundhogging the action that is most important to get you to your goal. You are on the right path right now.
You get the point. The best way to ruin your best success is to come up with a better idea.
This is probably the first and last time you’ll be told to stop having good ideas, but seriously. Stop having good ideas. When you set up a groundhog day, you cannot change that day until you succeed.
Here are a few tips to help you stop having good ideas:
1. Watch old episodes of Star Trek or baseball.
2. Eat a dozen donuts and drown them in a liter of chocolate milk.
3. Spend an evening reading the setup instructions for a piece of furniture from Ikea.
Don’t cheat on your groundhog day. Put yourself in a loop that doesn’t end until success. The movie would have stunk if Bill Murray could take a break from Groundhog Day at any point because he felt like living Saint
Patrick’s Day instead. You are locked in. The only way to let yourself out of Groundhog Day is reaching the goal.
Don’t let visionary poison corrupt your path.
“Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”
—John Eldredge
In business, my greatest weakness is my “ready, fire, aim” mentality. I get an idea and go after it like a rocket before taking important preparatory steps. That weakness sometimes slows the steady growth of my work in business, but when there is an emergency in the business and a decision has to be made with imperfect information and few resources, that weakness is my greatest asset.
While in hindsight I can see the problem of visionary poison clouding my business and causing catastrophic results, I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. I took a few days at home away from the office to think things through. I just needed to reset and figure it all out. No clear answer came. I had done everything right according to what I’d learned. I never sat complacently—I had expanded like crazy.
All I saw was that our traffic was consistent, we had far better products, and yet far fewer customers were buying. Without an answer, there was only one path forward. If I couldn’t increase revenue, I had to cut expenses—to the bone. Emily and I prayed, worried, and stressed, but the only conclusion we could find was that I would have to walk onto the orange carpet and tell my employees they were being laid off. How could this have happened?
I walked in on a Monday morning and sat down with my little team. I met with them individually and told them I simply couldn’t justify the expense of employees and an office when the business was shrinking. I gave them as much notice as possible and gave as much severance as I could possibly afford, but I told them I had to let them go.
When they left the office that morning, I broke down in tears. I was completely alone in that office with no answers as to how to fix the problem. I let my team down. My dream was slipping from my grasp. My business had become what I was known for, and it was disappearing. I stuck my neck out and went rogue from law, and now I had a shell of a business left.
