Written in 2014, while I was running a home care business.
One of the most important lessons in entrepreneurship is learning to do whatever it takes to get the job done. That can mean researching something you’ve never done before, or rolling up your sleeves and wading in even if you have no idea what you’re doing. A few examples of this have come at me full force lately.
Learning to lobby
The first example has been the most visible to the outside world. I’m learning to become a lobbyist, for my own business.
I never thought I’d be taking myself down to the North Carolina Legislature, asking for clarification on licensing regulations and a lifting of a ban on new licences. There has been a moratorium on new home care and personal care licences for three years, due to expire on June 30. In theory we were then supposed to be able to apply for the expanded licence. The reality is that a provision was introduced in the budget extending the moratorium.
So we started lobbying for new licences for private-pay home care agencies. Letters to legislators, phone calls, and this week, going down to meet several of them in person.
I had to walk into a situation I knew very little about — and still don’t appreciate all the subtleties of — and get to work. Because that’s what you do when you own a small business. You wade in and do it.
Picking an email platform
A second example: setting up email lists for the businesses. I’d never used any of these programs. Limited information, no expertise. I relied on Google and just picked something.
I know from Dan Ariely’s work that people frequently fail to decide at all, because they’re afraid of being locked into a choice. Often it’s better to make a choice than to thrash for months or years. So I chose Mailchimp and moved on.
I’m not an email marketing guru. I made a decision and did what I had to do.
The thing nobody says out loud
People assume that because I do these things confidently, I’ve either done them before or I genuinely know what I’m doing. The reality is that I don’t.
I just know that the cost of failure here is fairly low, and the cost of failing to act is much higher. So I make a judgement with limited information and go.
Where this is good advice, and where it isn’t
Reading this back years later, the instinct still holds. But “do whatever it takes” is the kind of advice that can quietly ruin a business if you apply it without a filter, so it’s worth being precise about when it’s right.
It works when the cost of being wrong is low and recoverable. That’s the actual test, and it’s the one I was applying without naming it. Choosing the wrong email platform costs a migration. Choosing the wrong accountant costs considerably more. Signing the wrong lease can cost you the business. Speed is correct in the first case and reckless in the third.
It works when nobody else can do it. Lobbying for a licence change affecting my own company was not delegable. Learning an email tool, arguably, was — and at the time it was cheaper for me to learn it than to pay someone. That calculation changes as the business grows, and the mistake owners make is not noticing when it has.
It stops working when it becomes identity. “I’m the person who figures things out” is a useful self-image right up to the point where it stops you hiring anyone. Plenty of founders who genuinely can do everything end up doing everything, permanently, and call it resourcefulness.
The filter I’d use now
Before wading in, three questions:
- What does being wrong cost, and can I recover from it? If the answer is “a few hundred dollars and some wasted time”, go now. If it’s “the business”, slow down and get advice.
- Is this genuinely mine to do? Not “can I do it” — you probably can. Whether it needs to be you.
- Will I still be doing this in a year? A one-off worth learning is different from permanently absorbing a job that should belong to someone else.
The answer is still usually to wade in. Most decisions are cheaper than the delay, and most owners over-estimate the cost of being wrong while completely ignoring the cost of waiting.
But it’s a judgement, not a rule. The version of this advice that gets people into trouble is the one that treats doing everything yourself as a virtue rather than a stage.
