"Not Ready" Is the Most Expensive Story You'll Tell Yourself
"I need to get clearer on my positioning first."
That's what a young agency founder told me when I asked why he hadn't reached out to his network yet.
He had relationships with people who could send him business tomorrow - as we all do.
(His network is full of .1%-ers. One with over 6 million YouTube subs, another over 4 million. A top 10 podcast in the world. So it’s that kind of network.
But that’s not the point.)
And he hadn’t touched a single one of those opportunities for over a year.
His offer hadn’t changed.
He knows his ICP with the type of clarity we should all wish for.
He knew which relationships to activate.
And he had a rough idea of what he'd say.
Whatever clarity he thought he was waiting for? I thought he already had it.
What he really needed was permission. From himself.
He'd scaled too fast once before and tried to skip a couple of levels.
As we know, nobody gets to skip a level.
It went badly.
And as a result of that experience, he developed a new habit to protect himself: don't act until you're sure.
So he kept preparing and refining.
And telling himself next month would be the month.
It's a totally natural response. You get burned, you slow down.
Can happen to any of us.
But when the preparation stops producing new information, it's not preparation anymore.
Then it has become procrastination.
Everything he needed was already there.
Relationships, team, track record, world-class network.
The only thing in the way was the story he kept telling himself about why now wasn't the right time.
And that story was getting expensive.
Warm relationships don't wait around. People move on. Priorities shift. The longer you sit on a connection without putting it to work, the harder it is to activate later.
I asked him: "Do you think you're only going to get it right moving forward?"
He stopped.
Because the answer was obvious. Of course not.
Nobody gets it all right.
But he'd been waiting to check the ‘perfection’ box before he would let himself move forward.
As a founder you just don't get to make many decisions where the outcomes are certain.
And to be honest, those are pretty easy decisions to make.
Your job as a founder is to make the tough decisions. The ones when you're not going to have all the information or absolute certainty, yet a decision has to be made and action taken.
If you're waiting for absolute certainty before deciding, you might never move forward.
You make the best decision you can with the information that you have in that situation, and then you go.
And then clarity arrives.
But founders who wait for clarity to show up first are going to be waiting a long time.
The gap between "I know what to do" and actually doing it is where founders lose months. Sometimes years.
The founder in this story started making calls that week.
Without touching his positioning. 🙂
He just had to give himself permission.