WAIT is a 4-Letter word

I remember when I was a kid my parents would ask me “do you have ants in your pants?” That happened a lot. I couldn’t stand to wait around when I had something I wanted to do. Well, that trait turned into a good thing in business, but for different reasons. When I was a kid, I just wanted to get outside and grab a baseball mitt and ball and head for the ball diamond to play a game. In the business world, that drive to keep moving in the right direction can be the difference between a successful business and one that fails.

I’ve been in slow-growing businesses before, and I’ve been in hyper fast-growing companies. One of the key differences between the two is that hyper fast-growing organizations don’t slow down or wait for anything. The trick is finding the right balance of risk vs reward from an organizational perspective. If you move quickly on a decision before you have all the available facts, what will the ramifications be if you made a mistake? One of the businesses I was in that was hyper-fast growth was in regenerative medicine. The development of new uses of the technology were using was going rapidly, but the clinical studies needed to gain reimbursement and medical use took time. A slower growth company would gather as much research information as they could before they made a call which configuration they thought would be best utilized for optimal performance. A fast-growth company would gather some of that information and then create a configuration that would work well enough and run with it. For example if the product was to be used in healing hard to heal wounds like Diabetic Foot Ulcers where conventional treatment would only heal 25% of the wounds in 12 week. A fast-growth company would gather perhaps 60-70% of the information and develop a configuration that would heal maybe 70% of the wounds in 12 weeks and could be on the market in perhaps 9 months. A slow moving company would wait until they were able to gather perhaps 95% of the available information and then would develop a product that could heal 75% of the wounds in 12 weeks, but it took them two years to get to market. If both companies started at the same time then one would have been on the market for well over a year before the other, gaining market share that is hard to take over.

Depending on what type of business you are managing, and the associated market opportunities and competitive environment, you need to decide what is the threshold of information you need before you make a decision. Do you need 90% of available, 80%, 60%? The quicker you make a decision, the better, but the less informed you are the more likely you will have to change course later.

The bottom line for me is that you always need to be moving forward and make decisions and go into action as soon as you can. If you wait to see what is happening in the market or wait until you just get the perfect amount of information – you could be giving up market share.