Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Rethinking Strategy, and Thinking Too Much

When building a startup, you have to spend some time thinking about what your game plan is and how you will execute it. But you shouldn’t spend too much time, especially when you are in the middle of a campaign and need to shift gears. The fact is, you are probably thinking way too much, and the solution should be, that you think less and act more.

This certainly sounds counter intuitive, and it is, but it’s the best thing you can do. Why? because when you think too much, you waste time, tons of time, trying to find the proper solution and you never have the perfect answer. There is only the optimized solution.

What you should do is just act, which ends up being a test. Then you evaluate the results, and then you reiterate as needed or shift gears again if it’s not working.

Your ideas and your theories can never properly predict what will happen, so there is no perfect solution, especially when there are so many factors at play when building your business.

Instead, you should just make something happen and see how that works out.

We made the mistake of thinking too much about switching over from bespoke dress shirts to custom made dress shirts to co-created men’s dress shirts. There was a ton of time wasted in between those transitions which meant wasted opportunity because we were thinking way too much.

Should we offer slim fit dress shirts? What about fitted dress shirts? Should we tell our customer which of our dress shirts are 100% cotton dress shirts and which we cotton polyester dress shirts?

The answer wasn’t easy. Instead, we just made it happen and reviewed how our customers reacted to the changes.

That’s the best way to run a business, without thinking too much and just executing and reviewing.

Thinking too much is a killer. Execution is important and will make the difference between a stagnant and a growing business.