People often give up far too soon

People often give up far too soon and never know what might have been."

He is right; and he should know. As a content marketing expert, he teaches people to adopt organic means to grow audience and attract thousands of people to their website. At one stage, Bill got more than 100,000 visitors a day to his site! And his message is simple: just keep on publishing. Don't give up too soon.

I am not here to talk about content marketing. Instead I am going after the more fundamental point: don't give up too soon.

This actually begs the question: how soon is too soon, and how long should I wait before I pull the plug? As all startup owners know, we need time for our idea to take shape, grow roots and start sprouting. Yet there is no magic formula to determine the right amount of time.

I started offering my strategic thinking program in 2004 in Singapore. At that time, nobody knew what that meant - many still don't! - and even when we taught people to use it in myriad different situations, the program still remained on the fringe. It was not until 2012, eight years later, that organizations started looking for a program to help their managers look beyond silos and think more strategically. Suddenly the program "shot to fame". It was only then that we realised we were ranked on the first page of Google for the phrase "strategic thinking program". Such is the power of longevity, I suppose.

Of course, during that time, I had almost forgotten about strategic thinking and went about selling other programs. The only thing I didn't do was to kill it. And I suppose, therein lies the rub. Had I taken it off our suite of programs, we would not have had the success we now enjoy. But it was a full eight years! And what if I didn't have other programs to run? What if I was developing products rather than services? Would I still have had the ability to stay on track for all that time? I seriously doubt that. So that begs the question, when is it time to call it quits?

No more time, no more money

Some will be forced to do so after the money had run out. But that is not the answer. Over the eight years, I had on countless occasions needed to borrow money to keep the company afloat. It seemed an endless vicious cycle. No sooner had I paid off one loan than the need to take up another one arose. It was a nightmarish situation that would no doubt tax even the most persistent entrepreneur. Yet, had I thrown in the towel too soon, I would not have gotten to this point.

Some people give themselves a timeline. They might say, if within the next 3 years, we don't break even, or we don't make $1M, or whatever, we will pull out. But how do we know for sure our idea needs 3 years, 5 years or even 8 years? If it is something new, and there is no precedence, you can never tell.

So how long should we hold on to the idea before calling it quits?

I suppose, if the money's run out, the business opportunity is not panning out and your people have walked out on you, it is time to quit. But we cannot wait until we get to that stage to make that decision. So, I suggest the following even before you start your venture:

1. Make it cheap.

Start small. Test the idea and the market. Don't go in with guns blazing and big lofty ideas. And don't make this your Hail Mary pass. If your next meal is dependent on this idea, you won't have enough time. Starting small allows you to kill the idea without regrets, something that keeps people in the game for far longer than they should be.

1. Measure, measure, measure

If you don't know what to look for to assess how well your idea is doing, you shouldn't even be doing it. Create all kinds of metrics along the way and watch them like a hawk so that you have a sense of the direction your idea is heading.

1. Learn to pivot

Related: When is the best time to change? - What does MH17 teach us about pivoting strategies

When you find yourself heading down the wrong path, it is time to pivot. This requires you to discover what's not working in your system, and put in corrective actions. Some of these require another new idea. So you test it again, starting at point #1 again.

So when is it time for you to quit? When you have run out of pivots.

Do you need help creating your metrics? Drop me an email [email protected]. I'll gladly work with you to make that happen.