You may not know this about me, but I run little experiments ALL. THE. TIME. And it’s not because I have all the answers. In fact, I don’t. But I’ve learned that to grow, you have to be constantly improving something in your business. And to know if those improvements are working, you need to test them.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: “Jessica, I don’t have time to run experiments in my business. Maybe once this busy period passes.”
Trust me, I hear you.
But here’s the thing: when you’re stuck in the overwhelm of the day-to-day, you’re operating as an employee in your business and not the CEO. And that’s not a sustainable way to run a business.
The job of the CEO is to hold the vision for what the business will become and ensure the decisions you are making will get you there.
Experiments are simply how you can test out those decisions to see if they get you closer or further to your goals.
Here’s how you can run your own experiment:
- Identify the problem you’re looking to solve.
- Determine the amount of resources (time, energy, money) you’re willing to invest in this round of trying to solve it.
- Identify at least one way you might solve it.
- Set a time frame for how long you will run the experiment.
- Set some criteria to determine if the solution was a success.
At the end of the set timeframe, review the data. Did the solution get the results you expected? If no, what else can you try? Set up your next experiment. If yes, what is the next problem you want to solve? Set up your next experiment.
Now, I want to be clear: an experiment is still a guess. You simply can’t have 100% confidence that the things you try to grow your business will work out.
If you’re waiting for that type of assurance, you’re going to be waiting a long, long, long time.
But you can create space in order to lessen the risks and shorten the feedback loop of the things you try. And that’s where running experiments comes in.
Don’t buy into the hype of the “magic bullet” solutions out there.
Instead, look at every investment as an experiment. Your hypothesis is that by hiring this person or buying and implementing the learnings from this course, we will see this result.
Remember, you don’t have to have all the answers. You just have to be willing to try new things and see what works.
Trust me, it’s worth it.