The Good and Bad of My RFA Mentality
On a Zoom call recently, a colleague was telling me about a problem he was having with his inbound telemarking division. In the past three months, he said, call lengths doubled while conversions halved. I asked him a few questions about the scripts he was using and then announced that I thought I knew exactly how to solve his problem. “Send me the scripts,” I said.
I felt confident that I was right because I’d experienced the same problem many times in my career. But when I read the scripts that evening, I realized that I had spoken too soon. I didn’t understand the problem. And my solution would not have worked.
I called him the following morning, asked more questions, and was eventually able to figure out what the problem really was and then offer several ways he could deal with it.
My rush to get to an answer was a part of a baked-in personality trait that I was already aware of. In a test I took several years ago on “leadership,” I was rated at the extreme end of what the test defined as the “director” style of getting group work done – quick to make decisions, impatient to get things moving, and willing to push others to accomplish goals.
Ready, Fire, Aim, the book I wrote about how to start and grow businesses, was based on this approach. The thesis was that most entrepreneurial businesses fail not because of poor planning, but because of overplanning: trying to perfect the business model. Starting a business that way will almost guarantee failure, because until you get your idea/product into the marketplace, you will not know how to present it, set the price, and sell it.
The strategy I recommended in the book was to get the idea/product out there and start testing it as soon as you can reliably do so (“Ready… Fire”!). It’s the only way to learn how to bring in new customers at an allowable acquisition rate before you have run out of money, patience, and/or time. Based on what you learn from your tests, you can then fine-tune (“Aim”) your efforts to maximize your long-term chances for success.
I have no doubt that the Ready-Fire-Aim approach is the best way to start a business or get almost any sort of major project off the ground. It is an equally good strategy for mature businesses that are launching a new product and/or product line.
But it is not necessarily the best strategy for solving problems once the business is up and running.
As a “director,” when I’m confronted with the problems that inevitably arise in any business – new or established – my instinct is to push for an immediate solution so I can get back to the challenge of growing revenues and profits. Ready. Fire. Aim. And sometimes, that works.
But some problems are gnarly and difficult even to understand. And that’s why nowadays, when I’m presented with a complicated problem, I force myself to override my instincts – to slow down, take a deep breath, listen closely to both sides of the argument, ask questions, and then push for a solution that will work well and last. (Friday, September 26, 2025)
