“Go slow to go fast.” 

• Plugging Holes as They Come. Most early entrepreneurial ventures face a rising tide of incomplete tasks, decisions, and resources. As the pressure builds, holes begin to appear in the dam. When a fledgling business has no structure in place to manage common business issues and conflicts, the entrepreneur is left to plug the holes with whatever is on hand. Your “go to” strategy is to plug your fingers and toes into as many holes as you can, as fast as you can. If the day’s crises are particularly bad, you might need your tongue or an elbow. After all, we entrepreneurs are pretty resourceful. You may slow the tide for a day, but it’s very likely that more holes will show up tomorrow—more than you can manage with your extremities.

• Reinventing the Wheel. Even though an activity (e.g., sales call) has been done many times, when entrepreneurs and their teams lack operating process, each task or action is being executed as though it were the first time. This means starting from scratch—a significant and unnecessary use of time and energy. Think of it this way—you drive to work on the same route every day. When you do this, it is easy for you to manage different nuances such as weather, traffic, being late and a myriad of other issues that affect your drive. Imagine if you took a different route every day.

• Communicating  Inefficiently.  When  entrepreneurs  neglect to establish forums for regular company dialogue, or fail to schedule planning and progress meetings, communication ends up in a tangle of email replies, forwards, CCs and BCCs from multiple parties. This swirl of email can take longer to unravel than to reply, and quickly uses up hours, if not days. You’ve just wasted an enormous amount of time that a simple protocol would prevent.

Developing and implementing “process” does take time. For many entrepreneurs, the concept of “slowing down” to put that process and structure in place (e.g., create a standard sales PowerPoint presentation, set a standard pricing meeting), seems absurd—at least initially.