Strategic Quitting, Sunk Costs & eCommerce Business Owners

"Quitters Never Win"

Vince Lombardi said "Quitters never win. And winners never quit." I think that is quite wrong. Today, I want to talk about why Lombardi was so wrong and why quitting can be a powerful strategic action that underpins massive success.

Yes, you heard right.

Giving up in the face of adversity is often the sign of weakness you believe it to be. And yet...Strategic Quitting can be one of the most powerful, positive things we ever do in our lives and businesses.

"What?!" I hear you exclaim. Well, let me explain.

Ecommerce success - and the Strategic Quitting that often lies in the past

E-commerce is exploding at the moment. That means that many of us see crazy numbers posted all the time by power sellers in Amazon.

And we're very aware of that. Those of us who are members of communities of serious sellers are seeing our colleagues businesses exploding. You may be lucky enough to be seeing them in your own business!

I've had the lucky position in the 10 K collective mastermind of observing over the last three years. How several of the members businesses have grown from $1 million run rate to triple that. And that's before Q4 even kicks in. And we've even witnessed one member smash through the eight figure run rate ceiling. By the way, this was at a healthy profit too.

Now these results are all very impressive. And the entrepreneurial energy strategy and street smarts behind that are equally impressive. But I behind the  perseverance and stamina and hard work, there are some  less glamorous, but equally essential abilities. Including the ability to know when to quit.

Learning the right lessons

There are some experiments that were less, certain, less impressive. And experiments is really a polite way of saying, finding out what works. Which ends up looking like an overnight spectacular success. It takes a lot of trying things that didn't work

Danger in such situations is to take the wrong lessons from the very impressive activities of the entrepreneurs. Sometimes, of course the entrepreneurs themselves are not aware of the reasons for their own success.

Yes, perseverance energy and focus are obviously critical in any challenging activity.

Business sport or performing arts spring to mind as challenging activities. Having experienced classical music and London theatre worlds in the past, I've seen similar patterns in business hyper- growth companies.

All take a huge amount of persevering through difficulty. No question. Also, money is important, particularly of course, in business.But persevering with what? Using energy, for what things? Focusing on which things? And spending money on which areas?

I know for a fact that one of the businesses that smashed the eight-figure Mark recently that I've personally worked with would never have got there if they hadn't quit. Not quit being in business. Not quit the category of products they are in. But quit persevering with a business model that business used to run, that was pretty much broken. If they hadn't stopped putting energy into failing way of doing things, if they hadn't, in other words, quit a lot of things.

The Heretical Truth: (Strategic) Quitting is Essential to Winning

So that's why today I want to talk about quitting. It's a very unsexy topic. It's even seen as something a bit shameful. And it's even kind of heretical, if you believe in the American dream as a kind of almost religion for entrepreneurs. And yet, I think it's a very important topic. I'm not talking about quitting in the face of difficulty challenge or pain. That's clearly not the route to success. What I'm talking about is a concept called strategic quitting.