Guest Author: John Anderson, InFlight‘s Entrepreneur-in-Residence
The Eye-Opening Question That Changed My Perspective
I remember a meeting with one of our advisors, shortly after I became a new business owner. He asked a rather ordinary question for new business owners. That question was “Do you have an exit plan?”
I had to ask “What is an exit plan?”
If true wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, I became a lot wiser in that question. I honestly (and embarrassingly) did not know that terminology. My two partners and I had just bought a company, but I realized in that one question, that we already needed to be thinking about selling it.
The Overwhelming Learning Curve of Entrepreneurship
I would find many other things that I needed answers to, as I began my journey as an entrepreneur. I realized quickly that to be an entrepreneur, I needed to learn a massive amount, in an impossibly short time. I’m a voracious reader, but there was no way I could cram the amount of knowledge I needed to learn via books, into the limited amount of time a new entrepreneur has. I found my way to things like Blinkist, YouTube videos, and Ted talks; condensed versions of the knowledge I needed. But…the fastest way to learn that I found is by using someone else’s knowledge to do it. My two partners and I embraced the concept of ‘do what you are good at and outsource the rest’.
The Power of Outsourcing: Focus on What You Do Best
So, we hired advisors and outsourcing partners where we saw deficiencies in our capabilities. I’ll admit, it stung when we saw the cost of advisory services and outsourcing. It was sometimes difficult to understand the value of what we were getting, until we started exercises around seeing and forecasting opportunity costs. Essentially, we had to understand what trying to tackle certain business functions or processes ourselves meant to the rest of the business, or more frighteningly what the cost to our business was if we didn’t tackle the problem at all.
Understanding Opportunity Costs: The Hidden Price of Doing It Yourself
By going through an exercise of understanding our true opportunity costs (doing ‘the thing’ ourselves poorly, the time it took away from other things to do’ the thing’, or not doing ‘the thing’ at all), we were able to easily justify the fees that initially seemed impossible. If you are to scale, and especially if you are to scale fast, this seems an inevitable dilemma we’ll all face as entrepreneurs.
The Value of Mentors: Learning from Experience, for Free
Another way that we found the ability to ‘think with someone else’s brain’ was through building strong relationships with mentors. We saw that we could stand on the shoulders of giants, have instant access to knowledge it took decades to build, and it was absolutely free! There is, in my opinion, no better way to learn and grow as an entrepreneur, than through the relationship (or preferably, relationships) with mentors. If
you can’t name at least three current mentors, I would say that you are robbing yourself of an incredible opportunity. It’s not always easy, finding and cultivating those relationships, but hopefully no one became an entrepreneur with the expectation of anything being easy.
Embracing Ignorance: The Key to Smarter Decision-Making
Within these two lessons, on the relationships with advisors and mentors, are a million other lessons. The impact we saw through these relationships were transformative to our company (and to me personally) in more ways than we could count. So, embrace your ignorance, learn the power in the phrase ‘I don’t know’, and develop strategies that give you an advantage when you’re solving problems for the first time. This almost always requires the council of others, whether paid or not.
Final Thoughts: Be Smart About Where You’re Stupid
I’ll leave you with this, a phrase that has become a bit of a mantra for me. Be smart about where you’re stupid.
Interested in finding a mentor? Join a Nashville EC accelerator here.
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