I have been thinking a bit about the pros and cons of grinding it out versus transforming a company. By grinding it out I mean pursuing a path on which you are making progress but very slowly. So I am not talking about situations in which a company has not figured out at all what they are doing or is completely failing, but rather a situation in which every bit of growth takes a huge amount of effort. By transforming I mean making a big shift in strategy with the goal of finding a business that can grow rapidly and with a lot less effort.
This turns out to be a tough choice emotionally. There is a huge risk in attempting to transform a business. You might wind up with nothing when you could have ground it out instead. Of course you might find yourself even more upset if you are grinding it out and someone else executes on the transforming strategy for a huge gain. It doesn’t help that there are good examples of both success and failure for either course and definitely not enough data to make any kind of rational decision. So I think a lot of this comes down to a very personal choice for the entrepreneur(s).
Having grown up in Germany where risk taking is not necessarily encouraged and overcoming one’s weaknesses is often considered more virtuous than playing to one’s strengths, my natural inclination in the past was towards the grinding out approach. But over the course of five different ventures I have become a fan of transforming instead. I now believe that failing quickly with a radical strategy that has big upside is preferable over grinding out a small win. Once you believe that then transforming becomes the obvious choice.
