Written by: Kathy Grassett, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you’re looking to escape your corporate career and launch a profitable consulting, coaching, or expert service-based business, listen up. I want you to fail faster. I realize that using the word “fail” is risky since fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles holding back leaders who are DONE with corporate from launching businesses. So, why would I ever tell someone to do it? Well, hear me out because doing it (and doing it faster) is the key to accelerating your results.
The phrase ‘fail faster’ comes from the technology world, which is the industry I spent 20 years in before becoming a business consultant and coach. Many years ago, when IT teams needed to write software, business analysts would meet with the client and write down all the requirements that the software should meet based on what the client said.
It was a long, tedious process, so the business analyst could spend weeks, even months writing these big ol’ documents specifying what this software should do. (I wrote several myself back in the day.)
Then technical people would go design the software and build it, other technical people would test it, and then, finally, toward the end of the project, it’d be given to the people who’ll actually use it, to try it out and make sure it did what it was supposed to do.
And that’s when the firestorm happened.
Clients would not accept the system as done. A few reasons why:
Since the people who provided the requirements were not usually the people who would use the system, they wouldn’t get a lot of the requirements right, and the system was built to the wrong specifications.
The client changed their mind about how some features should work.
The client thought of new requirements that they forgot to mention earlier.
So much time had passed to get the software to test, that the client’s business objectives had changed and now they needed the software to do something different.
Every. Single. Time.
Despite all the time spent trying to get it right up front, the software was never right in the end. Not even close enough to go forward and implement it.
Now, you don’t need to be an IT expert to know that that’s incredibly inefficient, wasteful, and frustrating for everyone involved.
The IT industry then evolved into what’s called agile development. And it was aimed at getting through those surprises or ‘failures’ faster instead of getting blindsided by them at the end of the project when it was too late, and the entire budget had been spent.
So, IT teams would get a good grasp on the big picture and just enough detail to start building the software.
They’d build a little, give it to the client to check out, and incorporate their feedback. Then they’d build a little more, give it back, and so on.
Much of the missed or forgotten details and changes would surface much sooner. Teams could course correct swiftly. In the end, the software that was delivered was much closer to what the client needed in much less time, without expensive rework.
As someone who worked through both eras of software development, I can tell you this concept was a game changer.
And a concept I now successfully apply to launching and growing new consulting, coaching, and expert service-based businesses, which is why you can start making good money in as little as 90 days.
Nothing is ever perfect when it’s implemented. Not software, and not consulting or coaching programs and businesses. So, you can take one of two paths:
Spend weeks, months, even years overanalyzing your decisions, cramming everything you think your future clients will need into your program upfront, and trying to make it perfect before anyone sees it ‒ only to realize afterward that it’s not what you or your clients wanted – and you didn’t make any money during this time, nor are you in a position to start. or
Spend a few weeks focused on the key foundational components of your new business and putting a simple, effective, and viable product that will get results out into the world to see how well it performs and how you feel delivering it – knowing that you will learn, evolve, change, and improve as you go while getting paid much sooner to do it.
I highly recommend option 2.
But you can’t improve on something if you don’t ever put that something out into the world to improve upon.
You’re going to run into surprises when you launch your program. You’ll miss some details. Some things won’t land as you’d hoped. You’ll learn a lot. The key is to figure this stuff out faster. Fail faster. Fail faster and learn what can only be learned by doing, so you can swiftly adjust and move on – saving precious time, preventing massive frustration, and accelerating the path to a new, exciting income, so you can replace your salary and kiss corporate goodbye.
Kathy Grassett, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kathy Grassett is a business coach, speaker, and leader specializing in career reinvention, business growth, and money mastery after a life in corporate. After a successful 20-year corporate career in IT, she had trouble adjusting to life as an entrepreneur and realized her lingering corporate identity was limiting her potential. Kathy now teaches clients her strategies for shedding the corporate layers that are holding them back and creating a simple but lucrative business model that will power them into exciting new levels of impact & income. Kathy’s mission is to help her clients surpass their corporate success by making a lot more money with a lot less effort in a way that is powerfully authentic to them.
