Untangling What You've Started
The process of untangling your business and taking a close look at what you’ve started is one of the scariest, most rewarding processes you’ll ever do for yourself.
You cannot do this alone. Emotionally, this is too big for one person, especially someone so close to the action.
Even if you get advice from different people as you untangle, you need a central facilitator; someone to help you filter and frame the information coming your way, based on your values, vision, mission, goals and objectives. Having this support will save you months of trial and error and lost revenue.
_____
In February 2023, I began interviewing entrepreneurs for the Second Edition of my book, the Neurodivergent Entrepreneur. From those interviews, I got clear on the stages in your business in which I can best support you and other ADHD Entrepreneurs:
Planning the business
Starting the business
Untangling what you’ve started
Resetting what you’ve untangled
Preparing for growth
In an ideal world, we would all start our businesses with the right amount of resources and with perfect information. Even with the dopest analytics, we cannot have perfect information. Good data and good models tells us how likely it is something will happen, but they cannot erase all risk. They cannot prevent the messiness of starting a business.
Even with good data and good models, I’ve worked with many ADHDers (this includes me) who just cannot understand how something works without working on it.
The untangling stage is very fragile. Things are not quite right, despite your doing all the things you’ve been told to do. It is easy to conclude you just shouldn’t be in business or in THIS business. So, you start to look around to explore your exit options; from this particular business or from business in general. You look outside yourself for the answers, even if you don’t know what your questions are.
Where do you go when you don’t know what to do? - social media, of course. You go to social media seeking an information solution because you think you have an information problem. If you could just get more facts, you would know what to do, but you don’t have an information problem. Still, listening to all the free advice out there seems to make sense.
Listening to advice from different people is like adding new threads to a tangled ball of yarn. The new threads make the relationship among the existing strands more complex, more confusing and harder to unravel. The untangling stage is about taking inventory; unraveling the ball, strand-by-strand, and laying out the strands side-by-side. You need to see what you have and what you need. Taking business advice, even helpful advice, from different people gets in the way of this process. This process requires patience, solitude, rest and reflection. Taking advice from different people is noisy and distracting. Also, it can cause you to shift your mission to fit the advice, rather than fitting the advice to your mission.
Untangling the strands is not necessarily about correcting. It IS a process of remembering: what you wanted and who you thought you could be through this business. While untangling involves some technical steps, it is about looking at the relationship you have formed with your business.
As the caretaker of your business, YOU need care in this untangling process. Untangling is both a caretaking and care-receiving process. YOU need care in this emotional process from someone who understands where you want to go; someone who can filter these different threads of advice and point out which ones will actually get you where you want to go.
There are lots of really knowledgeable people out there giving valuable advice. The question is: is it valuable to your mission? In your untangling process, how will you know what will be valuable?