Survival Isn’t Good Enough For Entrepreneurs

Surviving isn’t a reason to exist.

It’s not good enough to want to survive, your goal should be to excel. This is something I’ve dealt with personally – a company that survived but could never get beyond that.

Most of the time, surviving is better than dying, and if your business survived through the dot com crash or a recession or some similarly difficult time that’s something to be proud of – many, many companies didn’t make it. But the problem comes when you remain in survival mode even when the danger of dying is behind you.

Staying in survival mode – focusing on surviving rather than truly succeeding – creates a company that might last forever but really doesn’t go anywhere. Here’s where survival mode fails companies:

• It creates a culture of apprehension and fear.
• It limits creativity, enthusiasm and passion.
• It draws you towards mediocrity instead of superiority.
• It leads to incremental improvements versus radical innovations.

If survival is the best you can do with a company, it’s time to let it go. Or force radical change.

When starting a new business very few entrepreneurs dream of surviving, but many end up there. It’s hard to succeed, no question about it, but as soon as that’s an excuse for driving in first gear instead of fifth, you should get back to the drawing board.

Don’t get stuck in survival mode.

(Thank you to Charles Green for inspiring this post with his own Built To Last–Not.)