M&A Advisor. Investor. Corporate Development. Speaker. Great Podcast Guest / I help blue-collar business owners fall in love with running their company again while achieving exponential growth.
In baseball and business, no one bats 1.000. Sometimes, when we look at successful business owners, it can feel like everything they do works out. They launch a new product, and it takes social media by storm. They invest in a new startup, and less than five years later, it's promoting its IPO. Whatever they touch seems to turn to gold. This is merely our perception. Each one will tell you that their wins are celebrated and their losses are forgotten. They admit that they get things wrong a lot of the time. In baseball, you are considered a good hitter if you get a hit in 30% of your at-bats. You are a Hall of Fame hitter if you can get a hit 40% of the time. This means that the best hitters in baseball fail way more than they succeed. But we celebrate one hit and forget the other two at-bats. Even though we forget those failures, great hitters don’t forget them. They analyze them. They relive them. They talk about them. Trying to see what they did wrong and how they can improve. They then take that information into their next at-bat. Great business minds work similarly. While the world celebrates their big wins, they analyze and review the things that didn’t work out. They want to understand what things they can do differently the next time around – because, more often than not, they dive right back in with their new perspectives. When conducting this postmortem analysis, they are not looking for the one thing that caused the project to fail. There are often many variables in any project that need to be evaluated, and there isn’t just one thing that can be improved or changed. We can apply this to running our SMBs. First, we can be ok with projects not working exactly as planned - remember, no one hits 1.000. The results are just indicators, telling us if we are getting closer to what we want. Second, we can use the times things don’t work out as opportunities to identify where to improve. When things work out, finding these areas for improvement can be trickier. The most important thing to remember is never to stop trying. We may pivot away from what we initially thought would work based on our analysis, but we need to continuously leverage the experience and knowledge we gained from the setbacks.
