Perseverance

Few weeks ago I read the following tweet on my super sexy smart phone. The tweet was from Sim Simeonov veteran investor and entrepreneur.

perseverance is a good strategy for success also a great strategy for slow, expensive failure?

I immediately shared it to whoever was in the car with me. Then I tried to think back in my own startup experience and see if that is true. I would actually augment the statement abit

perseverance is a good strategy for success also a great strategy for always being in a barely surviving business

In my experience if one has true perseverance it is rare that they will fail completely. But often they get to a “just getting by stage” and never really make it out of there. I saw that in several projects we started. We kept going and going ignoring the bad signs and thinking if we only work hard we will get there. But without needed capital we had few people spread super thin and as such got only small clients. These clients stayed with us bitching and complaining but they couldn’t afford anything better so had no choice.

I saw same with partners when I was running our affiliate program. Some partners would work day and night and just making enough to pay the 3 people in their office. I kept paying them every month but they simply were not delivering enough traffic to our site to make more. They kept trying to sell me into new ideas but of course I needed to see results first before I signed anything.

My philosophy is – be persistent but evaluate your skills and be realistic. If you are not getting results needed find out what you are missing. Be honest with yourself and don’t think pure hard work will makeup for what you are missing. Figure out where you can get that something. Maybe it is a mentor ; Maybe investment; Maybe you need to outsource certain functions on focus on core competencies

Theo

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