Optimization as procrastination — Kelford Labs Weekly

“‘Stay the course’ is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course.

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Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes.”

— Donella Meadows, Dancing with Systems.

Today, as briefly as I can, I’m going to make my case that optimization is often a form of procrastination.

What I mean is, if you’re trying to optimize, scale, or grow your B2B service business before you have a critical mass of clients, you’re procrastinating on the real work.

The work of demonstrating value.

I see this more than I should: Entrepreneurs get an idea in their head about something they think they can deliver and sell. And instead of going out there and actually selling it, they skip that part and go straight to scaling it.

They start thinking about the software they’ll need to deliver it at scale, and they run off to research content management or ecommerce platforms.

Suddenly, they’re sending out mass outreach emails or running ads to drive traffic to their shiny but confusing website.

But what’s actually inevitable is that a few weeks or months pass with nothing but some coffee meetings, some vaguely interested friends or contacts, and an overwhelming sensation that they’re on the cusp of it really taking off.

What happens next? They start expanding their offering, confident that the problem is they haven’t found the right audience to target, or that they simply need to offer more to get on their ideal prospects’ radars.

Pretty soon, they’re taking sales courses, buying marketing packages, and hiring a biz dev manager to “pound the pavement.”

By this point, the sunk costs are so severe that failure is not an option, leaving investing more as the only alternative.

They decide to ‘stay the course,’ even though the course they’re on isn’t helping. They get locked in what’s called “escalation of commitment,” confident that the only way out is through.

That the only way to a sale is to scale.

But they were wrong. The way to scale is specifics.

It’s not about mass appeal, it’s about narrow focus.

And the real realization needs to be that focusing on scale instead of specifics is a form of procrastination.

It’s a form of perfectionism that leads to paralysis.

As bestselling author Ryan Holiday wrote in Discipline is Destiny, “An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees, because ultimately the biggest miss of all is failing to get your shot off. What you don’t ship, what you’re too afraid or strict to release, to try, is, by definition, a failure.”

“It doesn’t matter the cause,” he writes, “whether it was from procrastination or perfectionism, the result is the same. You didn’t do it.”

So instead of focusing on getting one customer (because that’s not enough to be perfect) these entrepreneurs focus on getting all the customers in the market.

Because that’s what impresses investors, right? That’s what proves their value, right?

But it’s a universal rule of our world that you can either have some of everything or all of nothing. And when we attempt to seize everything, we either miss the target entirely or cement resistance against us.

Instead, we have to accept that our portion is only part of the market, our success is only a piece of the greater growth of the system. So if we want our share, we must start small.

We must take something nascent but novel and fill it with increasing value so that its awareness, impact, and influence grows steadily and sustainably.

Optimization is what you do when you’ve already grown, when you’ve saturated your market and you need to extract additional value from the same or similar resources.

“The essence of marketing is narrowing the focus,” Trout and Ries wrote in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. “You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can’t stand for something if you chase after everything.”

From your perspective, it might look like everyone’s moving faster, and maybe they are.

But are they getting anywhere? Yes, everyone says you need to focus on scale. Everyone says you need to do mass outreach. Everyone says you’re just ‘one weird trick’ away from it all paying off.

But in marketing mass opinion is always wrong. By definition marketing is about standing out. So blending in with best practices is doomed to failure: The failure of stopping, because it wasn’t working.

100 years ago, copywriter Claude C. Hopkins wrote in his memoir:

“We must get down to individuals. We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person. Center on their desires. Consider the person who stands before you.”

And here’s the key: “However big your business, get down to the units, for those units are all that make size.”

To scale, we must have something to grow. And nothing times anything is still nothing.

You can’t scale a business without customers, you can’t grow a service offering that doesn’t have clients.

So we can’t procrastinate on doing the hard work of selling a single person by focusing on selling to everyone instead.

Get one client first, and let them lead you to more.

Instead of trying to get them all at once, and getting nothing at all.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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