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“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”
-Confucious

Read this quote once.

Read it twice.

Read it until you get it right.

This profound quote is the fundamental key to a lot of problems you as an entrepreneur might be trying to solve, right or wrong.

As an entrepreneur, can you relate to a situation where you were not happy with your sales numbers and felt your sales team has let you down? The problem might lie with how you are marketing yourself and position yourself or it could be you are selling to the wrong customer profile. Similarly, you might be trying to get your most critical sales and marketing problems in house (because that is how they were solved traditionally) but if you zoom out and be more flexible to engage with resources outside your organization, you might be able to solve those problems faster and cheaper.

Another example is that you might not be happy with the current attrition rate in your organization and blame the market conditions for it but actually, some of those problems need to be solved by fixing the culture and adopting new engagement models.

If you try to understand the examples above, you will notice how important it is to identify the real problem first before you hustle to solve it fast. This is only possible if you become unbiased, flexible, open to changing your original hypothesis, and work towards a solution that solves these problems holistically.

But, what if you don’t do this?

The perils of not acting are huge. For example, if you do not invest in figuring out the right problem, it is quite obvious that you are solving the wrong problem. This might give you the short-term joy of solving the problem and you feel overjoyed at doing the smartest thing, only to figure out later that you have been fooled by your own decision which ended up wasting your time, money, and resources with average results thereby frustrating yourself and your team.

Do yourself a favor. Question everything that you are doing.

Hustle to figure out the right direction first rather than hustle to do it faster just because it is a six-letter formula coined by a new-age entrepreneur.

Stop wasting your precious time. Stop wasting your hard-earned money. You might get the lost money back but you will never get the lost time and those million-dollar opportunities that you missed out on because the time window has closed and it is a red ocean now.

Are you open to going back to the whiteboard, questioning every assumption, and having a fresh look at defining your problems first before jumping onto any solutions? If you need any help in figuring out the right strategy or an execution approach for your business, we should be able to help you.

Write to us at [email protected] and we will schedule a call with you.