Saying no is a superskill

0:03 Welcome to business purpose and Clarity with patreon your host we talk about startup live insights practical tips mistakes failures and everything between saying no is a super skill when you are trying to avoid fatal mistakes big nobody wants to be the negative Nanny the one who is always saying no without giving anything constructive that's not what I'm talking about here this episode is about avoiding stuff which is really bad when should you do that Jeff Bezos I think early years of Amazon mentioned that the bigger the decision the longer you should take to think about it and if it's easily fixable and it's not that big decision from the company's perspective monetarily or some other ways the less time you should actually.

1:08 Commit to that one it did make sense so if you can try out some stuff and it doesn't work you change it then it's not that big deal then by all means do it because it's better to do stuff than not do stuff but when it comes to the decisions which can make or break the company you should spend more time on those things so it's a little bit of similar thing in a personal life if you think about buying a car you know if you're buying a house or some of these big things moving to another country or changing your career it's probably a good idea to take a little bit more time and don't just act on impulse like where should I eat today or should I go for holiday and stuff like that what are the business aspects where this is becoming really important whenever you recruiting people Key Personnel taking new business partners subcontractors customers suppliers investors in all those cases there are more important and less important.

2:10 Decisions you can make recently in the news I read about some really famous and it turns out that that person has been luring billionaires and claiming stuff which is not exactly on the money he claimed to have done stuff he actually didn't do but he was so skillful doing those things that a lot of people even publicly were backing him or at least being seen doing business with him and it took a while but then was like Hey that name somehow rangs a bell and uh yeah when I checked my records I found out that I had a meeting with that person we never did actual business with with that person in the company uh I was involved at the time but uh there were some red flags if you will even when we were talking with that person so we never actually went further but it was.

3:14 Unregamended by uh one of my business partners and we did have well in in according a few years or months I discussions with that particular person now looking at in the hindsight it was a really good decision not to engage on on business with that person doing a DD taking out persons is important if the downside is that you are scammed or even worse you're fraud or you're committing money and you're committing properly even your reputation online and and then the stuff doesn't work out what are the signs that you should check out well for example in I'm not saying exactly only on that case because I have some of these cases this is not obviously an isolated case um I've been around so there's many many occasions where people are not checking out but usually when people are appealing to trust me because you know I am who I am.

4:21 Or I claim to be who I am and I'm working with these people so it's basically like Association I'm associated with these people so trust me so you should just take the word for the when there's a lot of opaque things is another red flag so you don't really see you you have to if it's not by about the person that you trust me as a person or trust my authority on the topic or whatever because other people are trusting me but then it's like the process or the deliverables or the results or the track record references are opaque you don't see them you don't really have a way of validating whether they are true that's another red flag because if somebody's really talented and know what they're doing and confident in their business and experienced they can show you stuff they can tell you stuff in a way that they're not giving away something they want to.

5:24 Ask money for but in a way that make you comfortable that they know they they stuff and they are the real deal and then other the regular more like uh scam stuff where there's a high time pressure in a sense that you need to do the decision now we're running out of whatever time or you know we are almost at capacity or whatever if you really press pressure to do something now you really need to commit a lot uh in a rush you need to make a big down payment or whatever without being comfortable and it sort of sounds a bit odd or weird also there's something in the process that's not exactly done in a proper way if you would do it in a you know as like a regular business even a long term having a credibility and your reputation on the line one of the biggest things uh funnily enough is also is that it's the high cost the the services or the products around that are.

6:28 Really expensive in regards to the other other parties in the yeah you know competitors you could actually use if you think about all these things as a single items they may not raise Flags red flags but if you pull them together they start to look like a bit like in a way that it doesn't add up there's something fishy Happening Here and this is the the aspect I think what happened into in that particular case as there was something all together with Dotsy which culminated into the decision that we didn't want to go go further begging people despite their word even even when they are in a good intentions because there's also the case that some persons have done something really remarkable and good stuff and there's no scamming there's none of data involved or you don't even think that that's the.

7:34 Case but past success doesn't mean that they actually are capable of doing something in the future or in your case because if you think about let's say that there's a person who has been in a big organization and they have done something remarkable and it's it's public knowledge so there's no question about it that they are the the person who wasn't at that position but then you can ask that is it that person who did the thing is it the organization they had a really good team is it the processes is it the culture is it a combination of all those things which actually made it to happen because the higher the person is in the organization they usually tend to lead stuff and demand it and not exactly do this stuff so they don't have the Practical noise and if you're a startup you need the practical skills to actually get the stuff done you just don't need anyone who just says something and tells that you know please do that this or that because you need those doers and it might be that the.

8:39 Home you wishing that they can do that it's not actually the person who can actually manage to do that but they because of their reputation because of their past success they are in a position where they can claim quite a lot of money for the services they do but then your expectations are high but it might turn out that the results the deliverables are not on the money for you expected but there you are they delivered they did and there's no fraud in a way there's only a bit slight disappointment that you have a lot of money for things which are not exactly what you expected them to be and this actually applies also to the startup situation really heavily in a sense that if you're doing Leading Edge stuff it means that you need to be creative you're doing something which hasn't been done before and the burdens you are looking now to help you with the are they creators those who can do stuff from scratch.

9:45 Like Steve Jobs built Apple together obviously with other Founders but he builds stuff versus somebody who is hired to maintain just keep the processes running the person who is not building the stuff in the first place the person who is not doing the processes from scratch but just keeping them running that's a different skill set and don't make that mistake that you looking for somebody to build stuff but you actually getting someone who is really good at maintaining and operationally keeping stuff and even improving something which has already been made because that's a completely different skill set and this is often the case when you're looking for people from Big corporates they're really good at talking people they have people management skills what can they build can they do stuff that's something for you to figure out.

10:51 So saying no is a super skill when you want to avoid fatal mistakes.