The Way of the SEAL: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed by Divine Mark & Machate Allyson Edelhertz

Author:Divine, Mark & Machate, Allyson Edelhertz [Divine, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781621451105
Publisher: Reader's Digest
Published: 2013-12-25T23:00:00+00:00

PRINCIPLE 6

BREAK THINGS

The moment you say “I know everything” is the end of your growth.

—SHARON LEE, AMERICAN AUTHOR (1952– )

“We have a problem, Mark.” My CFO, Lisa, walked into my office with a worried look. We had just launched a new website and store for my e-commerce business, NavySEALs.com. The third-party platform powering the new site, which maximized evolving web technology, was an attempt to gain back some ground after we lost 40 percent of our merchandising business practically overnight during the 2008 economic downturn. Unfortunately, it looked like things weren’t going as planned. “The migration failed, and our organic search is down 80 percent,” Lisa told me.

She couldn’t have delivered worse news. In just a few months, we had gone from a thriving online store grossing $125,000 per month to about $2,000 a month. We were out of any meaningful capital and now we’d lost years of momentum in one fell swoop because our new web developers had screwed up. Organic search can’t be forced; it takes time for website traffic to grow. I could keep the business marginally alive, but I knew it would no longer support me, let alone a staff. I decided I needed to break things.

I retreated to my office and turned to my mental tools to contemplate and envision what the future of my business could look like. I had invested heavily in NavySEALs.com after turning my back on government contracting in 2007. My intent was to maintain NavySEALs.com as a cash-flow machine while I developed the SEALFIT concept, starting with a small training center. In the past, I would have pulled out all stops to recover the business, probably hiring someone to fix the website while attempting to scrounge up more funds. In such a situation, I would normally recommend to an entrepreneur to find another way to make it work. And it’s common to feel like, “I’ve already put so much into this, I can’t just let it go.”

Now, however, as I looked at the bigger picture, I realized it would take too much time and too much money, and I just didn’t feel enough passion for it. I made a conscious effort to break the mold of my “I can do this no matter what” thinking and let the old business go so I could focus on the new. As I did so, I started to feel energy shifting inside me and a growing optimism. I recognized that an opportunity had emerged out of the chaos, and I had a sense of “knowing” this was the right path, something I hadn’t felt strongly since leaving the SEALs and then government contracting.

I needed to streamline quickly in order to keep what I had afloat, so by the end of that day, I had decided to lay off the small NavySEALs.com team and reorient my expectations for the business. It wasn’t an easy decision, but checking in with my stand and my gut reinforced for me that my unhappiness and deep discomfort (who wants to lay people off?) was of the temporary kind related to making tough but necessary decisions.

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