Ready Fire Aim: Accelerating Past Failure and Into Success

By Michael Masterson

When you have an idea that seems good, it is imperative to test it as quickly and as effectively as you possibly can. Spend the greatest part of your initial time, money, and corporate intelligence figuring out if this idea is really as good as it seems. All the other things that you have to do to implement the idea (which tend to be both costly and disruptive because they will involve changes and affect many aspects of your operation) can be done later, if and when your idea is proven to be valid. If the idea doesn’t work, then you can drop it and move on to the next one.

The goal is to minimize the total corporate cost of testing each idea by reducing the time it takes to find out if it is feasible. By doing that you can test more ideas and by testing more of them, you can have more success. Lots more.

Ready, fire, aim is a way of testing more ideas - good or bad – in order to increase the number of good ones that get implemented.

Let’s say, for example, that you have an idea about improving customer service. Your idea is to send each new customer a little gift in the mail, thanking him for his patronage. You have read somewhere, and it makes sense to you, that when customers are given something for free they feel a moral obligation to reciprocate. If they feel that way, you reason, maybe they will buy more products from you in the future.

You could begin by hiring consultants and doing research, just as my partner and I did when we decided to go into the record-of-the-month club business. You could spend months and lots of money producing a $250,000 professional produced feasibility study that was 18 inches thick.

Or you could take a group of 200 new customers and send half of them gifts and then, over the course of four weeks, sell both groups a series of products. At the end of those four weeks the effectiveness of your reciprocity idea would have been pretty accurately tested. It would have either worked well, failed hard, or fallen somewhere in the middle.

If it worked very well, then you will have the impetus and maybe some factual information (from your salespeople) to proceed and make the new program a reality. If it failed completely, you will have discovered that, for whatever reason, this good idea didn’t work for your particular business. You can abandon it and go on to some other idea about improving customer service.

If it fell in that in-between place, my advice would be to drop the idea for a while. But even if you have to put the idea on hold, you will have tested its feasibility at a relatively modest cost in terms of money and the time and attention of you and your best people.

Ready, fire, aim is a rule that reduces the cost of failure, increases the chances of success, and recognizes the damaging impact that the space of time has on any idea – even the good ones. If you have a great idea but lose time trying to “get it right” before you test it, what you will discover is that it will often actually depreciate as you plod along trying to make it better.