In the previous article, I revealed the biggest challenge in Whitewater is Whitewater itself. The hardest part of getting out is that you and your team are getting bounced around at a relentless pace. There are too many problems coming at you too fast. It’s discouraging at best and can become downright paralyzing.
It’s like a game of whack-a-mole rigged against you. You have to find a way to beat the game itself.
Unfortunately, most founders get tricked by the game and lose because of it.
Here are three very common but equally wrong ways to solve the Whitewater problem and achieve Predictable Success. What is so hard about these three ineffective strategies is that they work, at least in our minds before we try them.
Each strategy will hit a mole square in the head and knock it down. But in the time it takes, two more pop up. And soon enough, that same mole is back at it again.
In other words, with each of these strategies, you can win a battle, but you’ll still lose the war that is Whitewater.
Wrong strategy #1 Finding bigger heroes
Have you had a month (or quarter or year) where your VP of Sales missed her mark, so you worked all weekend for several weeks, called on your biggest accounts, and dragged your sales back into the black?
Have you had your Director of Operations mess up a project so badly that you had to drop everything else and babysit him and the project step-by-step for a month just to avoid losing the deal?
Have you ever woken up and checked your business bank account balance, found it desperately low, and realized your CFO’s accrual accounting got you into a major cash crunch? So you re-ran all the numbers in Excel just so you can manage all of them yourself?
At one point, just working harder worked. Sure, things would go wrong, but you’d go all hands on deck and fix it. But that seems to stop working, and the gap between what your leaders can do and what they need to do starts to look more like a chasm.
So what do you do?
I hear this all the time.
“Oh, I just need to get a [COO, CFO, Integrator, President, Assistant, VP Sales, or any-other-title-you-can-think-of]. Then we’ll be ready to get out of Whitewater.”
The problem with this approach is that while it may address a symptom a year from now (i.e., a better-implemented sales strategy), it will make things harder in the short run and will rarely, if ever, address the root cause.
What is the root cause?
Heroes don’t scale. They are inherently unpredictable. And they aren’t even remotely sustainable. You simply cannot muscle your way into Predictable Success. Believe me, I’ve tried, and I’ve seen a lot of others try as well.
What does scale? We’ll get to that soon enough. But first, we have to talk about technology.
Wrong strategy #2 Solving with software
I can’t tell you how many of my clients tried implementing a new [CRM, ERP, Project Management, Accounting, any-other-technology-you-can-think-of], before we worked together, only to lose 10s if not 100s of thousands of dollars and 6-18 months that they’ll never get back.
The problem in Whitewater is not your technology. It’s your decision-making.
Jim Collins got it right when he discovered that technology is an accelerator, not a momentum creator.
And in Whitewater, your momentum is taking you in the wrong direction, and the last thing you want to do is accelerate in the wrong direction.
Yes, software and other technologies have their place, but only after you’ve made significant progress out of Whitewater and into Predictable Success.
In other words, you need to find a way to tame the chaos first, then codify that. When you do, you’ll unlock scalability like never before.
Wrong strategy #3 No real strategy at all
This category breaks down into two phases.
In phase one, they have lots of mole-whacking strategies. We’re going to double revenue. We’re going to open a new location. We’re going to launch a new product. We’re going to cut costs. We’re going to any-other-strategy-you-can-think-of.
Side note: these are actually tactics not really strategies, but that’s another topic for another time.
And none of it moves the needle. They all fall short, either never making it to implementation, stalling out when implemented, or producing lackluster results.
In phase two, a strange phenomenon occurs in leaders in Whitewater. When the losses that occur in phase one start piling up, these at-one-time nearly invincible founders lose their decision-making mojo. Their internal magic eight ball goes quiet. Their confidence starts to evaporate into thin air. And they don’t do anything. Sure, they’re busier than ever, but they’re not really deciding anything. And they’re not really doing anything.
They seem to just sit around in a half-defeated state, going through the motions, hoping that Whitewater will solve itself.
It won’t.
So what does work?
No, all hope is not lost. While there are many strategies that don’t work, there is a strategy that does. And if you are truly in Whitewater, and if you follow the strategy all the way through. It works just about every time.
The good news is it is quite simple to understand, and I’ll lay it all out for you in the next article.
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The Biggest Problem in Whitewater