Council Post: Riding The Waves: Five Steps To Take When Things Don’t Go As You Planned

By Andrew McConnell, Co-founder and CEO of Rented.

In a previous article, I talked about the business lessons open-water swimming in a choppy ocean taught me. I should have known that with something as vast as the ocean, I was nowhere near finished with my education at that point. Perhaps fittingly, my next lesson came as I took my 4-year-old daughter out to swim and snorkel with me in slightly less choppy circumstances.

My daughter is an exceptional swimmer. Since the age of 2, she has been able to swim across a 25-meter pool unaided. That being said, swimming in flat, clear, chlorinated water with well-defined parameters (side walls) and goggles on is a far cry from trying to do the same in the waves of a salty and seemingly endless ocean. Swimming your strokes in a calm pool is very different from adapting after a wave unexpectedly splashes salt water into your eyes and mouth, and there is no wall nearby to latch onto for safety. Or as the modern-day philosopher Mike Tyson put it so eloquently, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

As I helped my daughter adjust to the realities of ocean swimming, I couldn’t help but reflect on the parallel lessons the experience provided for business and for life. Just as the predefined parameters of pool swimming are very different from the open-ended nature of ocean swimming, so too are the lessons we learn from a case study or business school class different from the reality we face when actually going through launching a new product or even an entire company. As a mentor once told me, “In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, it doesn’t always work out that way.”

So knowing that no matter what you learn, how hard you study and how smart you are, things will play out differently than you thought, what are you left to do? I have found the following five steps to be helpful in building Rented, Inc.

1. Start with the mechanics.

Just as great artists and musicians have to learn the basics before they can go on to create entirely new genres, so too do we need to learn and understand our own business or industry before we can go on to the more difficult work of innovating and adapting. Getting splashed in the face by market realities will still be a rough wake-up call, but you will be far better prepared to cope than if you jumped in before ever learning to swim.

Personally, when launching my first company, this meant 10 months of deep-dive research into the industry, ecosystem, existing players, market potential and customer demand before attempting to launch my product in the market.

2. When things don’t go exactly as expected, stay calm.

With swimming, the worst thing you can do is start thrashing around and burning your energy in an unproductive manner. The same is true in business. You have only so many resources to expend (money, talent, etc.) and so much time within which to get it right. Any wasted energy makes ultimate success that much less likely.

For my daughter, this meant getting her to understand she always has the recourse of her “safety blanket” of rolling on her back, floating and breathing calmly until she again feels comfortable. In business, this often means stepping back and not making any important decisions out of fear, anger or a similarly overpowering emotion.

3. Reassess.

What has changed? What remains as you expected? How do you now need to adapt to the new reality? At Rented, Inc., Covid-19 was a perfect illustration of our need to do this in real time. Our core product before the pandemic was a full end-to-end service offering with a similarly high sticker price to go along with it. As more of our clients faced tough economic realities and sought to find work for their own team as well as reduce their external spending, we understood that rather than full service, more companies in our industry would be looking for more affordable technology and tools for their own teams to use. The world around us had changed; we needed to do the same.

4. Execute.

As others had to cut costs and resources at the beginning of 2020, we made the risky decision to instead invest in innovation. Keeping our full team on board, we also hired new employees with new skill sets during the pandemic. The bet paid off. Within months, we were able to launch a new, tech-only offering to adapt to the market and our clients’ changing needs. The response was breathtaking.

5. Continue to iterate.

The world will not stop changing, and neither can we if we wish to survive and thrive. As well as things have gone thus far with our new product launch, we know we are far from the finish line in terms of adapting to our clients’ ever-changing needs. Yes, we have successfully made it over one wave, but in the limitless ocean that is life and business, we understand there are plenty more still to come on the horizon.