Honest Marketing

When Is It Time to Quit?

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 40

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Seth Godin shakes things up in his book "The Dip" by suggesting that quitting can actually be a smart move. 

It might sound counterintuitive, but this idea carries some serious weight in the worlds of business, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

To dig deeper into this intriguing concept and see how it fits into our entrepreneurial journeys, let's talk about when it makes sense to call it quits, when to switch gears, and when to push through.

We're going to break down five key principles that can guide your decision-making process. By weaving these principles into your business strategy, you can confidently navigate the ever-shifting landscape of business. It's all about making savvy choices and staying adaptable in the game.

Don't miss out; tune in to this episode now and start applying these valuable insights to your own ventures. Your path to success might just start with knowing when to say "quit"!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Five principles for effective decision-making in marketing
  • How to make strategic shifts in your marketing initiatives
  • When to pivot and persevere in marketing and business

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And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Travis Albritton [00:00:00]:

In his book The Dip, Seth Godin explains why quitting is actually a good thing and that the only way to get ahead in life and in business is by quitting. Sound crazy? Well, it actually makes a lot of sense. So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about when to quit, when to pivot, and when to persevere. Welcome back to the Honest Marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritten, and today we're talking about quitting. Everyone's favorite word. No, not really. If you're in business, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're in marketing, typically you are in it because you want to succeed.

Travis Albritton [00:00:42]:

You want to reach your goals. You actually want to get to where you're going. But sometimes the only way to get to where you're going is by quitting something that isn't working or may work, but it's going to take more resources than you're willing to give to it to see if it works. And at the end of the day, every business has the same problem when it comes to investing in marketing and sales strategies and things like that. And it's opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the big problem for every business because you can technically do anything, but it doesn't mean that you should. And you also don't know what you don't know. And so it's certainly possible that that shiny new marketing or sales strategy is going to be a great thing for you.

Travis Albritton [00:01:26]:

It could also not work at all, and you don't know until you try it. But then when you do try it, when do you know that it's time to stop trying it and to go towards something else? So that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. And what I want to share are five principles that I've taken, both from Seth Godin's The Dip, which is a short read, but I highly recommend it, and other business books as well. When it comes to figuring out when is the right time to quit an initiative, whether it's marketing or sales or even entire businesses, when it's time to pivot, make strategic shifts in how you're approaching something, or time to persevere, time to push through and say, you know what? This matters so much, or this is so important or so critical, we have no choice. We need to push through. And there are certainly times when that is necessary. And so hopefully these five principles can be helpful for you as you think about them and apply them to your own business and the things that you're currently working on right now. Take the ones you like, throw away the ones you don't, and hopefully you can find this helpful.

Travis Albritton [00:02:29]:

The first principle that I found to be really helpful for me when I think about marketing, when I think about sales, is to treat everything like an experiment. Because if I go into something new, if I try something different and I put all my eggs in that basket and say, this has to work. More often than not, I put more pressure on myself, on my business than is necessary. If instead I approach it as an experiment, not knowing what's going to happen, but having a hypothesis, an educated guess on what may happen. But I won't know for sure until I try something that alleviates a lot of the pressure that I put on myself and that I put on my business when I'm trying something new. And the truth is, if you are trying something new, you don't know what to expect. Other companies in your space may already be engaged in whatever strategy that you're pursuing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your results will reflect theirs. And firsthand data, data that you collect yourself through your own experience is always going to be more reliable and more pertinent than second or third hand.

Travis Albritton [00:03:30]:

Data that you gather from a case study or some other business in your industry or your niche or some consultant or expert who's telling you, these are the things you have to do. That's second or third hand data. But firsthand data where you actually experience it yourself, you learn the lessons yourself, and you gain wisdom through that experience. That is ultimately what's going to scale over time and compound over time. So you have this collective wisdom that you can apply to new things moving forward. And so just remember everything that you're trying for the first time, you don't actually know what to expect. You may have a hypothesis, you may have an educated guess about what you think will likely happen, but you don't actually know for sure. This is especially true when it comes to running advertising.

Travis Albritton [00:04:13]:

If you've ever run Facebook ads or Google Ads, you may think one thing is going to work. It's like, man, videos are the way to go. And then you run one random image campaign and it blows all the videos out of the water, and you think, what was I thinking? Why would I ever assume that I know what's best? But it's until you actually get that first hand data and experience that you can actually see what's working and see what isn't. And so seeing a new initiative as an experiment, it keeps you curious and it allows you to be less hard on yourself if it doesn't turn out the way that you hoped that it would. All right, so that's the first principle that's really helped me in my mindset when I approach new opportunities is to treat everything like an experiment. The second principle is to start with an MVP. Not Most Valuable Player. Minimum Viable Product.

Travis Albritton [00:05:00]:

Now, this is a concept from Lean Startup, a book by Eric Reis. It's a very popular business book where he talks about the importance of shipping lots of things quickly, not in their full form, but as the minimal viable version of themselves. And so this is where you're trying to see, what's the lowest cost quickest experiment that I can run to validate this concept that I have, this idea that I have. So instead of thinking, okay, we're going to push full court press into LinkedIn ads, $10,000 a month, it's going to work, quote unquote, because other people have said that it works. Instead of doing that, saying, what if we started with $200 a month? And we just wanted to see what it was like. We wanted to learn the dashboard, wanted to learn the process of creating Linked ads, the targeting, which is very unique compared to other platforms. And so starting with a minimum viable version of whatever it is that you're wanting to push into and pursue can reduce the risk of it not working out. Because let's say that you have a $10,000 version of an experiment and a $200 version of an experiment, if you invest $10,000 in something, especially if you're not doing seven or eight figures annually, that's a big investment.

Travis Albritton [00:06:14]:

You want it to pay off, you want it to go well, and you also start digging yourself into this sunk cost of, I've already invested $10,000 into this. So even if it's not working yet, I feel like I need to justify that expense by investing even more and doubling down on that initial bet. But if instead you bet $200 and it totally flames out, or it's not what you expected, or you learn enough to know, you know what, this isn't really the best opportunity for me and my business, then the thing that you're writing off is significantly less. The emotional burden of writing that off, of quitting that initiative is significantly less. And so it could allow you to very quickly make shifts and changes and pivots when necessary, because you didn't bet the farm on something that was unknown to you or something where you weren't sure what to expect. Instead, you started with the minimum viable version of whatever it is that you were doing and then allowed that to validate itself before you invested more money, more time, more resources into that initiative. So I always like to identify what's the minimum viable version of whatever it is that I'm trying to do, starting there, knowing that if I get some initial results that are promising, I can always invest more into it, I can always push farther into it. But if not, then I can cut bait quickly and avoid the feeling of loss and loss aversion that comes from sinking a lot of resources into something and then doubling down because you feel like it has to work.

Travis Albritton [00:07:42]:

Okay. And so definitely appreciate Eric and his work in Lean Startup. It's a great book. If you haven't read it yet, I'll leave a link to it in the show notes if you want to pick it up. But it's a great business book for any business, not just startups. The third principle that I wish I had learned sooner, but I'm grateful I know it now, is to predetermine your limits. Predetermine your limits. Whenever you're doing something new, decide ahead of time how much time you're willing to invest into it, how much money you're willing to invest into it, and at what point will you need to make a decision about whether to continue pursuing it or not? Early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make everything work perfectly.

Travis Albritton [00:08:24]:

And so the amount of time that I was willing to devote to something was indeterminate. The amount of money I was willing to invest in something was as much as it takes. And what ended up happening is that because I didn't have a healthy set of expectations going in, because I didn't know what I didn't know and because I had not determined the cap or the top end of what I was willing to invest in something. I ended up getting really stuck multiple times on business models, sales initiatives, marketing concepts that, if I had taken a step back at certain points in time, I could have realized or recognized. This isn't going the way that I thought that it would. Maybe I should reconsider my initial set of guesses that I made when I started this thing. And so by predetermining your limits, by deciding ahead of time when you're not emotional about the decision, when you haven't invested the money yet, when you haven't invested the time yet, and say, we're willing to invest six months and X amount of dollars into seeing if this can work for us. And then when you hit those limits, pause and reestablish where you are and decide, do we want to continue investing into this both time, money, resources, your team's time, their resources? Or should we quit this initiative? Should we shift? Should we pivot or should we persevere? But when you predetermine your limits, that allows you to know when is the right time to quit, to know maybe if we kept investing in this, it could turn around, it could work, but maybe not.

Travis Albritton [00:09:59]:

If I think back on my own experience with this lesson in particular, this is the one that I learned the hard way, where I was investing in a new business initiative. There was an opportunity to accelerate the results that I was looking to achieve, and the investment was going to be a six figure investment to make this thing happen. And while I had seen it work for other people and so I knew it was possible, I knew it could work for me. Secondhand, data is not as reliable as first hand data, right? And so the only way to know would be to try it, to give it a shot. But I actually didn't have a limit on the amount of investment capital investment I was willing to put into this. And so it started with $20,000. And I was like, okay, I'm seeing enough traction to keep going. Let's keep going.

Travis Albritton [00:10:46]:

The next investment was $80,000, and that was a stretch for me at the time. I was fully self financing this business venture, and so $80,000 is a lot of money. And had a conversation with my wife about it. We got on the same page, we were both on board, and we went for it. And then after that, it was about $10,000 every single month I was having to invest in this particular initiative. After the first month, it was pretty obvious that there were some very broken elements to what we had built that were not going to be easily fixed. And if I had been smart at the time, I would have recognized, sure, I've invested over 100K into this already, but based on what I know now, I don't see this turning around. I need to pivot or quit, as painful as that quitting would be.

Travis Albritton [00:11:37]:

Instead, what I did was I dug in my heels and said, no, this has to work. And I doubled down and continued to invest an additional $10,000 every month for several months after that and basically just prolonged my agony. It didn't change. It didn't pivot, it didn't shift. And the only reason that I stopped was because I was in danger of starting to lose personal assets like our home. Now, I was smart enough to not make our house collateral for this thing that we were doing. But if I had at the time decided this is the amount that I feel comfortable investing in the growth of this particular business model, then that would have helped me avoid a lot of those lessons. Hard lessons learned.

Travis Albritton [00:12:23]:

Now, again, you don't know what you don't know. I didn't know it wasn't going to work going in. I thought that it would. That's why I invested the money, right? But if we can take a long term view of our businesses, and instead of looking for necessarily the silver bullet to just launch us into the stratosphere, look for those incremental improvements that have the opportunity to pivot into exponential growth, but doing so with the bets that we're comfortable with. Because if I look back at that, and instead of investing six figures and then five figures every single month, I had said, you know what, I'm willing to invest twenty five k twenty five thousand dollars in pursuing this particular strategy. So that means the opportunity that I ended up choosing, I wouldn't have been able to afford. But there were alternatives. There were other things I could have done to learn similar lessons or to have a similar experience, and that would have been a much better use of my money and time.

Travis Albritton [00:13:22]:

And so if I had had that constraint of I'm not willing to spend more than 25K, because at this point in where the business is, it doesn't make sense to spend more than that, then that would have given me clarity and boundaries around what was responsible and what I should be doing when I'm trying something new. So when I talk about predetermining limits, it's really just about knowing yourself, knowing what you're able to invest, what you're willing to write off if something doesn't work. And then once you reach that limit, feel free to quit, because you've decided that, you know what? This isn't working the way I expected it to, or I'm not willing to invest more than I currently have into this. And so it doesn't make sense to keep going. Or you take the lessons from that and you bring them over to the next opportunity and continue to compound your experience and your wisdom in marketing and sales. And that's what Seth Godin talks about in the Dip, is knowing when to quit. When you hit your limits of what you're willing to invest in something that's new or different that you haven't tried before. So that's principle number three know your limits and predetermine them before you start, when you're not emotionally attached to whatever it is that you're trying to do.

Travis Albritton [00:14:27]:

The fourth principle is stay focused on the long term, the long game. Because at the end of the day, no one likes to have a project fail or under deliver. That's not why we do what we do. You don't run ads. You don't launch podcasts. You don't jump into content marketing. You don't do DMs on LinkedIn because you expect it to fail or because you want it to fail or under deliver. You want it to perform and succeed.

Travis Albritton [00:14:53]:

But staying focused on the long game helps you remember that you are charting a path through the unknown towards where you want to go. That the path to getting to your ultimate goal achieving whatever kind of business you want to grow or build is unknown to you. You don't know what all those steps looks like. And so every single time you try a new experiment, you do something new. And you minimize your downside by predetermining your limits. And you're smart about how you approach it by starting with an MVP, a minimum viable product or version of the initiative. Then you can see each of these tiny experiments as little plots in your charted route to get to where you want to go. But sometimes you have to go around obstacles.

Travis Albritton [00:15:42]:

You get stalled out, and then you have to restart it. And so staying focused on the long game, it allows you to keep everything in perspective that, sure, this one initiative may be really disappointing, that you had high hopes for it, you were really excited about it, you wanted it to work, and it's not. But just because one particular thing that you do doesn't give you the results that you're looking for. It doesn't mean that you're not going to get to where you're going. It just means that you have one more lesson that you've learned that you can apply moving forward. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if any one particular experiment works or not. Just that eventually through enough trial and error you get to where you're going. That's what matters.

Travis Albritton [00:16:21]:

It's not about the individual experiments. It's not about the individual initiatives. It's about the overall trajectory and path that you're on and staying in the game. That's something that Simon Sinek talks about in his book Infinite Game that there are two different kinds of players. There are finite players and infinite players and finite players. They play by a certain set of rules and within the constraints and the bounds of those rules and you don't break them. Infinite players are in it to play the game. If you're a finite player, you're trying to win.

Travis Albritton [00:16:48]:

If you're an infinite player, you're in it to stay in it. You're in it to survive. You're in it to sustain the game, to keep playing. And so in business being an infinite game, there's no winners or losers. There's just businesses that are ahead or behind at any point in time based on whatever metric you choose. Then the goal is not necessarily to have every experiment succeed. It's simply to stay in the game, to continue to be in business, to continue to serve your clients and your customers at a high level regardless of what that looks like. And so when you can stay focused on that long term, on that actual goal, that it's not about hitting your quarterly revenue projections.

Travis Albritton [00:17:22]:

It's about staying in business and staying in the game and building something that you're excited about, then that allows you to be okay with experiments that don't work out, that fail, that don't give you the results that you're looking for. So that's principle number four. Whenever you're doing something new, always frame it in the context of the long game, of what you're hoping to achieve over decades, not months. And then the fifth principle is kind of like a culmination of all these things and it's know when to quit, when to pivot and when to persevere. Because no matter what you do, you're going to reach a point where you have to make that decision. When is the right time to quit? It's the right time to quit something. When the initiative, whatever you're working on shows a little promise of delivering the desired results and you're ready to try something else. So part of predetermining your limits and starting with an MVP is you can learn quickly if there's something here, if there's actually traction to be had and a path towards a profitable, successful venture.

Travis Albritton [00:18:23]:

But if after investing the time and resources that you've predetermined you're willing to give to it, you're not seeing the results that you would need to see in order to sustain it or to commit to it for a long term, then because of opportunity cost, you want to shift to something else. You want to shift those resources you're committing to that project to a different project, to either learn a new lesson or to double down on something that's working somewhere else. And that's a very rational, reasonable, good thing to do as a business person. But what about pivoting? When should you pivot? Not completely abandon something, but shift the way that you're doing it. And that's when the initiative has shown preliminary results. So you're seeing something, but you believe that a tweak or a shift in your approach to it can help you get unstuck and back on track to where you want to go. So I see this all the time with branded podcasts where companies, they start a branded podcast. They're fuzzy on why they're doing it, but they feel like a podcast is a good thing to do.

Travis Albritton [00:19:30]:

And I'll interact with a lot of these companies after they've done 910 episodes and they're like, it's not working. And then after we sit down and we talk through it and I ask them what their goals are and what they're trying to get out of it and try and nail them down to some positions. Do you care about building a large audience or making money? Because you can have a podcast that has 500 downloads a month that gets $10,000 a month, or vice versa, podcast that gets 10,000 downloads a month and only earns you $500 a month. Which would you prefer? And once we start clarifying some of those things, and I'm able to provide some actionable advice about specific things they should shift or change. The problem was not the podcast. The problem was their approach to the podcast. And with new information and new understanding and new clarity, they're able to pivot their podcast into something that's actually meeting their goals. So sometimes you just have to change the way you're approaching something that just like Thomas Edison and the light bulb, you figured out a thousand ways that it doesn't work, but it only has to work once.

Travis Albritton [00:20:26]:

And so if the results are promising enough, you've seen enough traction with it that you know you're not ready to quit on it yet. You're willing to invest more into it. You want to change the game a little bit. You don't want to just double down on what you have been doing because you'll probably get similar results to what you've been getting. And if you aren't happy with those results, you don't want more of them, right? So ask yourself, what is the thing that we should change about our approach to this, about our presuppositions, about what we think going into this? And how can we potentially pivot into a better opportunity within the same game, the same goal of what you're trying to achieve? And then when should you persevere? When again, you're not seeing the results that you're looking for, but you're trying to decide, should you stay at it and what I look to myself is, is the trend promising? So maybe I'm not where I need to be yet. But I've seen enough progress with the time and capital investment I've made in it to it so far that I'm confident that if I continue to invest in it in the same way that I have been, I will continue to see that trend improve and if it's a sales or marketing initiative, become profitable. And if that's the case, then I just reset my predetermined limit. I don't throw it out the window.

Travis Albritton [00:21:46]:

I don't say, okay, we're going to invest as much as we need to in this, because the trend is good. I reset the limit. So if it was $10,000, I'll reset it to $20,000 or something like that to give me more time to learn more time to see if the trend continues and then at that next limit, reassess it again. Are we still seeing the trend that we want to see? Is it still trending towards profitability or whatever the goal is that you have for the project or the initiative? Or have things changed where I need to decide to pivot within this particular project or quit it altogether? Take those lessons learned and apply them to the next project. So quitting is a good thing. Quitting allows you to try lots of things, test lots of experiments to see what works, see what doesn't, and to move quickly. And in today's economy, in today's businesses, that's more important than ever with how quickly everything is shifting around. And so take these principles, these five things that can allow you to try lots of things.

Travis Albritton [00:22:45]:

Do so intentionally and deliberately, not scatter shot and all over the place, and take lessons that you learn from each one. Build on themselves, compound your wisdom and your experience so that you can take those lessons and apply them to the next experiment. And just as a review, the five principles to help you move fast, make quick decisions, and persevere when necessary are number one, treat everything like an experiment. Number two, start with a minimum viable product. Number three, predetermine your limits. Number four, stay focused on the long game or the long term. And number five, know when it's time to quit, when it's time to pivot, and when it's time to persevere. So I hope that this was a helpful, kind of like, mindset episode, and I like to be really practical in this podcast, but sometimes it's good to just get back to the philosophy of how we're approaching these kinds of decisions.

Travis Albritton [00:23:39]:

And so hopefully this can be helpful for you and how you think about sales and marketing experiments and tactics and initiatives. If you like this episode, let me know. You can send me an email at hello@honestpodcast.com, I'd love to hear from you, and if there's any questions that you have or topics you want me to cover, I would love to do so. Well, I hope you have a great rest of your week. And as always, be honest.