Planning an Effective High-Speed Chase
High-speed chases never end well, including the chase I saw yesterday.
The individual being chased hadn’t thought the process from beginning to end, and it’s similar to business planning mistakes. I’ll get to the business part of the discussion shortly.
First, the high-speed chase.
What Happened
I was driving around 11am on Manchester Road, a busy stretch of road (2 lanes each way) near my house in St. Louis. Now, I drive on this street 6-7 days a week, and I know every side road and business along the way.
A car driving at a high rate of speed merged onto Manchester, weaved its way past 3-4 cars, and made a left. A police car with sirens and lights on was about 50 yards behind.
Now, you have to figure that all police cars in the area were alerted, and that other police vehicles were converging on the car being chased. When the car made a left, I knew the driver had a problem.
The strip mall he drove into had only one way to enter and exit.
Opps.
As I drove by the strip mall, it looked like the police vehicle had followed the other car behind the building. I decided to mind my own business, head down the grocery store, and glace over on my way back home.
When I drove back past the area, three police cars with lights on had access to the strip mall blocked.
What, exactly, was the driver’s plan when the chase started?
What Alice in Wonderland Teaches Us
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
This quote, from Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and other books, seems to apply here. Many of use start projects or businesses without fully thinking the idea through.
In my case, I started an online tutoring business for accounting and finance in 2002. I knew accounting, I liked working on my own, and I saw other people online doing the same thing. Here’s what I didn’t consider:
· Hours: Students generally want to meet at night or on weekends, which was hard on my young family.
· Income: The rate I charged per hour was reasonable, but it didn’t include the prep time required for each session. Based on the time I spent, my earnings per hour were half of what I projected.
· Sustainability: Eventually, students graduate and don’t need your services, and I had to constantly refill the pipeline of customers.
Fortunately, I was willing to pivot to a business model that worked: freelance writing. This brings me to my next point.
Be Willing to Pivot
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) defines pivoting as: “a lateral move that creates enough value for the customer and the firm to share.” Many startup companies use the Lean Startup approach to get a company off the ground.
Eric Reis is the author of “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”. As the Harvard Business Review explains, the Lean Startup process…“favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional ‘big design up front’ development.”
Try an idea on a small scale, make adjustments, try another idea. Pivoting can also work for large enterprises.
Two Famous Business Pivots
Many of the biggest names in business have pivoted more than once.
PayPal
Fast Company explains that: “PayPal pivoted not once, not twice, but at least five times before finding the innovative business model that led to its success.”
The first idea was Fieldlink, a business that provides cryptography for handheld devices. The company changed its name to Confinity, and created new technology to transmit IOUs from one Palm Pilot to another.
Finally, the firm pivoted to the payment system service that PayPals offers today. PayPal’s team included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman, who also founded LinkedIn. These highly successful business people saw the wisdom in making a business pivot.
Twitter
If someone asked you about Odeo, you’d probably have to Google it.
Odeo was a network that allowed users to find and subscribe to podcasts. The founders decided to pivot when iTunes started to grab market share. Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone pivoted and started Twitter.
The Lesson
When you have to take a detour, or experience a setback, pause and think: it might be an opportunity to change direction and find more success.