Don’t go there

By Fiona Boyd |  Email This Post

One of the most useful skills I have learned as an entrepreneur is one that on the surface appears rather negative, but is really more positive. It’s about staying the distance with one’s passion and mission and not allowing distraction to take you away from your purpose– I call it the ‘Don’t go there’ principle.

I’m not sure why our minds do this to us, but if you’re anything like me you probably suffer from a degree of ‘now if I added this to the mix, how much bigger could everything be?’ It’s really useful to compare this urge to what happens when you add the wrong quantity of a given ingredient when making up a recipe that you’ve tried a million times before and you know works well, but somehow you’re tempted to ramp up your favourite ingredient just this once, and you end up with something that’s no longer edible.

So too it is with business. Recently David and I decided to get involved in a new online publishing business that is in a niche area and the target market is quite a specific type of person or corporate. It’s a straight up commercial, information-product business focused more around the distribution of accurate and up-to-date information and knowledge, than around community and networking.

Communities are great, Arts Hub was an online community of sorts, but communities never roll-out quite as you describe them in your business plan, and with online communities you need to understand that there will be a fair amount of surprise, variability and randomness in the behaviour of those who join you. Usually an online community that really works becomes in many ways, the property or domain of the community members. The originators and founders tend to slink into the background just as soon as they see members of the public interacting with each other freely and without needing to be jollied along or encouraged, or without having to ‘seed’ not quite authentic interaction.

Now, we were presented with the opportunity of combining or integrating this new venture that David and I had become quite attached to with a community for a sub-section of our target market for the commercial venture and immediately my sixth sense went ‘don’t go there’. And I’m really glad it did as the whole issue of trying to be all things to all people is a trap that David and I had fallen into before in our Arts Hub days, and fortunately for me, some distant memory was triggered that said ‘warning, warning – this opportunity is not going to work’.

In business as in life, there are some places you should not go.

I’m not going to say that under no circumstances the two things – commercial products-based business and online community could not be combined – there are greater minds than mind who will work out how to do this with ease and probably some who have done it already. However, as soon as the idea was presented my mind scrambled and the clear visual picture I’d been holding of our new venture, suddenly became fractured and unclear and fuzzy and the vision no longer had clear boundaries and a clear and exciting purpose attached to it. That was when I knew for sure I was having a ‘don’t go there’ moment.

And for once in my life, rather than trying to see things from other points of view and reaching the conclusion that maybe the others involved knew something that I didn’t and that I should just go along with things and find out where it all headed, I decided that the new opportunity was not an opportunity and that I didn’t want to go there. And what a relief that was, we all discussed the issues a bit and decided that indeed the two businesses weren’t enough alike to be integrated and should therefore be stand alone ventures independent of each other, but with maybe a bit of idea or resource-sharing where it might be mutually beneficial.

I mentioned that during our Arts Hub journey, David and I had quite a few ‘don’t go there’ experiences or more accurately experiences where we went there and found out why we shouldn’t have. Our book Niche Content Millionaire highlights a number of such experiences. I remember one of these was with a client who we provided a global news and content service for. In the first year or so of providing the service, the relationship worked just fine but beyond that the client started to take our work for granted and seemed to want more and more, for less and less. Really, we should have changed our relationship with this client at this stage or stopped the arrangement, but instead, wanting to be ‘nice guys’ I guess, we continued and ended up with  a situation for a time where we had more person hours on that client’s gig than we had on Arts Hub news. And Arts Hub subscription sales were worth around 40 times what we earned from the client in monthly revenue. Clearly this was a situation where we should have ended it earlier, and not continued to ‘go there’.

I do remember one opportunity offered to us in the early days of Arts Hub where an impresario wanted us to do some kind of events database and spruiked that we’d all make millions out of it. David and I were skeptical, we really couldn’t see where the ‘value’ was commercially but this guy was a bit of an identity in the arts and entertainment industry and somewhat older than us and as he claimed, infinitely more experienced and connected.

We both had a ‘don’t go there’ feeling about this so-called opportunity and David asked around some other experienced players about this guy and found that his credentials were somewhat less than impeccable and he’d been touting his events idea for a long time and not been able to interest any other technologist to work with him.

So, we didn’t got there! I’m really glad about that, our focus at the time needed to be on Arts Hub and on our jobs and news service and everything that didn’t pertain to our mission with Arts Hub would have been a massive distraction.

It’s easy I guess to at times lapse from a laser focus on your business and when that window of wondering about what else is out there opens just a bit, your mind can tend to run away and convince itself that there is more and better in something quite different to what you have decided to do. But if you have set your plan and all the evidence is pointing to it working, then do yourself a favour and learn how to be firm and make sure you just ‘don’t go there’.

And if you’ve got any ‘don’t go there’ experiences that you’re not too queasy about to share, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear more about how fellow entrepreneurs decide on what’s worth their attention and time and what’s not.

Photo: flickr Annika Lux

Fiona Boyd and David Eedle go into more detail about their ‘don’t go there’ moments and more embarrassingly the times when they ‘went there’ and shouldn’t have, in their book on the Arts Hub journey Niche Content Millionaire.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

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