Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Business Lessons from My Daughter’s Graduation—Just Get It Started
For my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute, I worked with a manufacturer to create a truly memorable graduation present available nowhere else. It was something I felt could also sell well to other graduates and other schools, so I hoped to show it to buyers at the campus gift shop and such.

Unfortunately, other priorities didn’t give me a chance to get everything perfectly in place for a sales presentation. I didn’t get pricing fully worked out with the manufacturer. I didn’t work out a sales pitch. Hey, I didn’t even know how to put together a successful sales pitch.

I had a lot of confidence in the product, but nothing to back me up. I was on my own, without the usual crutches of gathering lots and lots of information on some new endeavor before taking the first step.

I could easily have put the idea aside as a missed opportunity and hope that—someday—I could come back, perfectly prepared. But I winged it instead.

I went to various buyers on campus with an unpolished, amateurish presentation and an offer to send pricing and specifications when I got home. None of the buyers had any reason to mistake me for a professional salesman.

But my gut was right about this being a product that was good enough to sell itself. I came home with interest from multiple buyers, contact information for four other potential outlets if the first two don’t pan out and—oh, yes—contact information and a personal recommendation from one buyer to present my product to a national buyer that supplies over 500 college bookstores across the US.

My natural inclination—and the natural inclination for many small business owners—is to wait until I get everything perfect before I make a move. Get every last detail worked out, every last problem solved, and every last risk de-risk-ified. Only in an environment where we feel that every chance of failure has been eliminated do we feel safe enough to take even the smallest risk.

Where would my product be, though, if I had taken that approach? No buyers eagerly awaiting my pricing, no contact info that could lead to over 500 more retailers. I’d be stuck back at the beginning with nothing more than a promising idea and a long list of tasks I felt obligated to do before even starting.

Which position would you rather be in? You can always work on making it perfect once you have it started. But if you never get it started, there’s nothing to perfect. The most important step isn’t to get things perfect; it’s to get them started.