Winners are Quitters!

Today I'm going to let you into a secret. And that's that winners quit  - a lot. Now, that might sound counterintuitive, but sometimes quitting can be one of the best things you can do in your business. Now, before we get into the detail I'd like you to do me a quick favor and subscribe to my channel.

If you've not come across it before, I post new content every single week, and I'd love to be able to share that with you. My name's Paul, I'm an accountant, I'm a CFO, I'm an entrepreneur, and I've got over 25 years experience in helping businesses to grow profitably. And more than that, I've also grown three businesses of my own over that time. So believe me when I say I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur. 

Okay, so let's get back to the subject. Winner's quitting? How can that be right? Well, actually, it is. I recently came across a really interesting book by a woman called Annie Duke. The book's called Quit. It's about the power of knowing when to walk away.  And when I read it, it kind of blew my mind because it showed me how to think about business decisions in a really different way. And I thought it'd be quite good to share some of that with you. Annie starts off by telling a really great story about Stewart Butterfield.

Now, if you're not heard about Stewart Butterfield, he's the CEO of Slack- one of the most amazing business tools out there was something we use in our business. If you've not come across Stewart Butterfield, before he set up slack he was already a very successful entrepreneur and businessman.

In fact, he was running a very successful gaming business before he got into Slack. But something very interesting happened to him when he was running that previous business. That business was growing. It was already very profitable. He was doing okay and he just finished an investment round which was worth several million dollars.

And he’d actually just received that investment in the bank and he sat back on a Friday night thinking, right, that's that done. But then something interesting happened. He started to think over the next few days about what he really wanted to do with the gaming business and how successful he thought it was going to be. Also,when you take money from people, particularly a lot of money, it really puts a lot of pressure on you.

You have to really believe in yourself and know what you want to do with the business. And he sat back and he thought about it for a few days and he thought to himself, actually, I'm just not feeling this with my gaming business. I don't think this is going to deliver the returns that I'd like to be able to give my investors. So he did something that we all need to do more business, he went with his gut and  e  did something which was incredibly brave. And to be honest, I think pretty much unheard of in the business world, which is that he changed his mind.

He called up all those investors and said, thanks very much for believing in me and the business. But, actually, I don’t think this is the best use of your money and  so I'm going to give you back that investment. 

He’d had an idea in the back of his head for a little while about their own internal communication tool, which was a very good way of teams communicating, sharing information, making it very easy to organize that information via threads and suchlike. And he'd always thought there was something in that, thinking perhaps he could commercialize that. And that's what he decided to do. He decided to quit the gaming business and focus on that communication tool. So he founded Slack based on that very tool and the rest is history.

The Slack business grew incredibly fast and was eventually sold to Salesforce for $28 billion. And that was all because he had the courage to think about what he was doing with his current business, and had the courage to quit that and try something new.

Before we go any further, you know, I'd love to hear whether you've ever had the courage to quit something that you knew deep down wasn't working? If you have to leave me a comment below.d love to know your thoughts. 

So, that story really got me thinking about things that I've done in my businesses over the years, things I've quit, and things that perhaps I should have quit earlier, which weren't working. Quitting is an unpopular word, but there are several benefits from this.

Firstly, there is no merit in sticking with things that aren't working  - in the UK we call that flogging a dead horse. It's comforting to keep doing the same thing you’ve always been doing, hence that famous phrase ‘better the devil you know.’ But actually, there's no merit in sticking with something If it's not working for you,If it's not making money, or if it is causing you grief. Having the courage to say no is really, really powerful.

That brings me to my second point. Quitting has got a very negative connotation, hasn't it? No one likes a quitter. We hear that so many times growing up. But actually quitting isn't about losing. It's about making bold decisions and taking control. So that's another way to look at it. As business people, as entrepreneurs we have to make  brave, bold decisions. The people we work with expect us to be making those big, brave decisions.So that's something to think about. 

Thirdly, quitting frees up both time and resources to focus on things which will have a greater chance of success. If you've already decided what you're doing isn't working, stopping those things and freeing up cash, time, resources, or staff, allows you to focus on something else, even if it's something new that you've not tried yet, the chances are that's got a greater chance of success than something you're doing that you know isn't working anyway.

And, as we all know in businesses, the resources we have are limited. So actually freeing up those resources to try things with a greater chance of success is one of the number one ways to grow your business profitably.

And finally, I just wanted to say (and this might sound like a small point, but again, this to me is really powerful)  that quitting is all about taking back control an that’s really, really empowering. You're putting yourself back in charge of your actions. That makes you feel, frankly, great. And the more often you do it, the better you're going to be at taking scarier, bigger decisions. And ultimately, it's going to make you a better entrepreneur. Actually, if you think about it, making brave, bold decisions is probably the trademark of pretty much every successful entrepreneur around.

There’s one more fact in Annie Duke’s book that I found fascinating. She cites a really interesting study about poker players, contrasting the difference in behavior between professional poker players and amateurs. She found something really interesting, and that is that professional poker players fold significantly more often than amateurs. And that's because, to amateur poker players, it's all about how it looks to others if you fold.

But professional poker players see the bigger picture. They’ve played poker so much, they know the chances of their hand winning and they are very comfortable with saying, no, this hand is not going to do it and folding when it’s right to do so. They’re playing the long game, which is what we all should do in businesses. The more we get emboldened to make those big decisions, to quit things that aren't working, the better off our businesses will be and the quicker they'll grow and the more profit they'll make. A

Well, that’s it for today. I hope you're finding these videos helpful. 

There was a fair bit of detail there so to make things easy for you, I've got a free fact sheet which summarizes the points we've talked about, so if that's helpful, feel free to download that and think about how you can start applying those to your own business.

And also before I go, I also have another free factsheet, which I’d really like you to download, and it's all about turbocharging your cash flow in your business and doing so without selling a penny more.

So if that's interesting as well, click the link below and download it. And if you've not done so as yet, as I mentioned earlier, please subscribe because I'm posting new content every week and I'd love to be able to share that with you. Well, thanks very much for listening. I appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.