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 Sheet Metal Manufacturer Who Wasn’t Ready
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 I asked was — is this going to be a burden on you?
He said no, he could make it work. And I said — come on. Be straight with me. 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. I said — why are people doing that to you? He said he’d always been lenient, and it was coming back to bite him.
So here’s what we did. I told him — why don’t you get the funds together, get those billables in, and then we start. This way you don’t have to eat top ramen for dinner and you don’t have to pay a bad web company when you could be paying a good web company.
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, as mama says. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you tell someone the truth instead of taking their money.
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. That’s what we’ve been doing this whole time — trying to figure out ways so that small business owners can get this kind of thing done and off their plate. So it doesn’t have to be one of the ten things that’s pushed off 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
Yeetish Question
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.