My family and I live in some kind of crazy wildlife-gone-mad bit of suburbia, so animals of all shapes and sizes are a common sight. We get deer, turtles, frogs, insane kamikaze squirrels and bizarre nocturnal beasties that seem to have opposable thumbs (from what they’ve been able to get in to). Of course, this all fascinates my daughter — and me for that matter.
The other day I was coming home having just picked up my daughter from daycare. As we got out of the car, I saw a hawk-like bird (that seems to live somewhere in the back yard) just a couple of meters away. I was just about to point it out to my daughter, when I realized it was busy ripping the head off a squirrel and flying away with the blood-soaked furry corpse.
Needless to say, we didn’t spend time looking at the pretty birdie…
And that got me thinking about how sometimes in business, you have to choose to ignore real events and feedback that are happening around you.
Obviously, this is dangerous territory to be in. I am a big believer in keeping things real. A is A, after all. And I’m firmly on the same side as Public Enemy when it comes to hype. But sometimes it does seem necessary to ignore reality.
Some examples:
1) We’ve been talking to many different VCs. Some of them have had a real problem with the fact that we are targeting the SMB (small to medium size business) market. This is usually because they’ve had bad experiences with an SMB-focused company. Why do we believe in it? It’s the only market that makes sense for us right now. The consumer market would require a radically different approach (all about traction and users and not about revenues), which in turn requires a consumer-targeted and foresighted VC. The Enterprise market is very much a walled garden. We immediately face multi-billion dollar players who are very entrenched in the market, customers that are mostly unwilling to try radically new solutions to existing problems. very long sales cycles and a market who’s growth appears to be slowing. Meanwhile, the SMB market is vibrant and growing. SMBs are very willing to try new tools and move much faster than an Enterprise when buying something new.
So we think we’re right and therefore choose to ignore anti-SMB feedback.
2) In the same vein… Some VCs don’t like Software as a Service. We see it as a logical fit for the SMB market. SMBs are usually light on IT support and infrastructure, so the ability to roll out a tool at the swipe of a credit card is pretty appealing.
We plan on offering a deployable version of the product, but version 1.0 will be SaaS. So we ignore the anti-SaaS feedback.
3) Back when our message was less clear, we got a lot of feedback. Some folks felt we were a knowledge management tool, some thought we should be part of the OS, others saw us as a business intelligence tool or a data warehouse or a wiki-killer. While some small part of each of those may be relevant, you still have to choose to ignore some of the "truth" out there.
But as I said, ignoring reality is a dangerous business, and it can have unintended consequences.
For example, when I ran an animation studio, times were often tough. Margins were thin and our survival was greatly aided by the genius cash flow management skills of our CFO. As a management team, we decided to insulate our team from the financial roller-coaster we were on. We made that choice because keeping the team together was vital to our success. The truth of the situation would certainly have triggered some job hopping, and payroll was never at risk, so we didn’t see much of a downside.
But the lack of connection between the team and the financial situation lead to some real issues. Some staff treated small projects very poorly because they felt they didn’t matter. Some continually pushed for aggressive raises multiple times in one year. Almost all were reluctant to adopt productivity tools that could have increased the amount of work we could get done (and bill clients for).
Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think we made the right decision.
But I’m not sure you can ever know which "realities" to ignore while you’re living through them. All you can do is remind yourself that you are consciously choosing to ignore certain events and make sure you have someone who’s a good sounding-board for the logic behind your decision.
And now back to our regular programing.