Today I ran my first half marathon. Around the 10th mile I was struggling to run up a steep hill, and I looked over and saw another runner walking up the hill next to me faster than I was running. I realized that it took a lot of energy at that point to try to run up the steep hills and didn’t make a lot of difference. That was a stark contrast to running down hills, in which a small amount of additional energy helped me go a lot faster. Because my energy was limited, I decided that I would walk up the hills and run down them.
Seasoned marathon runners would not need to implement an energy efficiency strategy such as this because they have plenty of energy to run up and down all of the hills. Because this was my first half marathon and because it has been many years since I have run a competitive race, this was an effective strategy for me today.
Effective small or start-up businesses also often walk up hills and run down. Large, well-funded businesses are like the seasoned marathon runners. These businesses have plenty of capital to effectively staff and fund projects. However, small or start-up businesses usually always are forced to make difficult decisions about allocating woefully inadequate resources to bootstrap their ventures.
When there aren’t enough hours in the day or enough resources for small businesses to do everything that needs to be done, to succeed these small businesses often need to consciously choose to walk up hills and run down. This means choosing the places where the limited business resources can be used most effectively and putting more resources towards those projects. It also means effectively identifying the places where the limited business resources are not producing the most effective results, and eliminating those projects, or reducing the resources focused on them.
Posted on April 30th, 2011 by Nathan Gwilliam
Filed under: Business Management, Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons
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