Post Summary: Next Quarter Will Be Just as Hard as This One
The right time tends not to arrive. Next quarter brings the same tight money, the same person who didn’t show up, the same fires. So readiness is the wrong thing to be measuring. What matters is whether something concrete will have changed by then, and for most owners the honest answer is that it will not. Waiting simply lengthens a list that never gets shorter. There is one exception, and it runs the other way: when the money genuinely is not there, pushing the date beats starting something that stalls.
One sheet metal shop got as far as the first payment before the card came back declined. Underneath it were six months of work he had done and never been paid for. We told him to collect what he was owed first. He called back nine months later.
Below: why every quarter feels the same from inside a small business, and what shifts once something stops sitting on the list.
Pending Tasks Carry Weight, Not Just a Price Tag
The cost of waiting isn’t money. It’s weight. When there are pending tasks, real ones, the kind you think about at 11 PM, your mind and body suffer knowing that that’s exactly what’s going on. The website you keep meaning to fix. The online presence you know isn’t working. The thing you said you’d handle last quarter.
A pending task does not help anybody. And staying in a situation you already know isn’t working is just a pending task with a relationship attached to it and is almost as bad as not hiring a good web designer because you’re worried about offending your friend that built your site.
So here’s how we think about timing.
The Client We Told to Wait
Small one-man operation. Wanted to change his website but said we were too transparent! We went over everything, he said great, let’s go. When we ran the first payment, the card didn’t go through.
Called him up. He said he needed to shuffle some things around. First thing we asked was, is this going to be a burden on you?
He said no, he could make it work. Come on, we said. Be straight with us. It’s okay. Do we need to push this off? Because the last thing anyone wants is to start something and then have it stop. It’s no good for anybody.
That’s when the real story came out. A lot of his billables hadn’t come in yet. He was six months behind. Six months of work he’d done that he hadn’t been paid for. Why are people doing that to you, we asked. He said he’d always been lenient, and it was coming back to bite him.
So here’s what we did. Get the funds together, we told him, collect those billables, and then we start. This way you don’t have to eat top ramen for dinner, and you don’t start something you can’t see through.
He laughed.
It was almost nine months later, but he did call. Sometimes you sort of write things off, oh, didn’t work out, but that’s okay. This one came back. Ended up being money from heaven. That’s what happens sometimes when you tell someone the truth.
What’s Different About Next Quarter
If you’re the type of person that keeps saying next quarter, and it’s been three quarters, maybe ten, ask yourself one honest question.
What’s different about next quarter, fundamentally, than this quarter or all the quarters before?
If you sit with that for a minute, you’ll come to the conclusion there is nothing different. Because every quarter is a disaster. Every quarter is a train wreck. Every single quarter is difficult. Money’s tight, or if it’s not tight, your employees aren’t showing up and you have to cover for them. There’s a slew of reasons that it’s tough being a small business owner.
We get it. Getting this one off the list is the whole point, so it stops being one of the ten things pushed to next quarter.
Eventually, that list can end. Wouldn’t that be nice?
The question was never am I ready. The question is whether anyone’s going to be honest with you about what waiting is doing. And if the answer to that honest question is “nothing is different about next quarter”, then this is the quarter.
C.S. Lewis, writing to a roomful of Oxford students who were wondering whether they should stop everything and wait for a world war to end before getting on with their work, described the exact pattern:
“We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.”
— C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time.” Source: hackneybooks.co.uk
Frequently Asked Questions
What if I can’t afford a website right now?
Then don’t do it right now. We’ve told prospects that directly, if the money isn’t there, we’d rather push it off than have you start something you can’t finish. If it’s a bad web designer that’s nice, that can make leaving even harder. Get your house in order first. We’ll still be here. The sheet metal guy waited nine months and came back when he was ready. That’s how this is supposed to work.