The Price of Impatience is Steep

When you are new to an industry and your company is young, stakeholders don’t take you too seriously or are extremely indifferent to your existence. Initially.

And as you play marketer, finance whiz, sales guy, and ops lead, you get overwhelmed. You feel amateurish. Things seem to take forever. You wonder if the effort is leading to anything.

Every. Thing. Seems. To. Happen. So. Slowly. 

As an entrepreneur, the most valuable commodity you have is your own time and labor. If you’re outsourcing essential tasks because you aren’t getting a quick response from key stakeholders or consumers, you are being seduced by the demon.

Agencies, fractional punks, etc., want you to be impatient so that you pay for their services. In reality, most will underperform vs. your hungry execution and the passage of time. If you can’t rush the bake time on some cookies, why do you think there is some magical agency out there that can accelerate the organic, cultural uptake of your brand by busy consumers?

The delay in response from the universe you’re experiencing has to do with your tininess and newness. That’s it.

Undoubtedly, the consumer is not panicking about disrespecting all those new brands, thereby ignoring them. There is no quick way to overcome the adoption rate in your category. But there are many folks ready to charge you for that impatience and ultimately not speed anything up other than the depletion of your working capital.

In CPG, this is especially true because the pace of consumer adoption and habituation can’t be accelerated beyond a particular cultural norm in your category. The rest is just essential positioning in the proper channels and moments in front of predisposed folks. And some brands, very few unicorns, get all that positioning just perfect ….or, as, in the case of my friends at Dr. Squatch Soap, it took five years to get there before it took off. 

All enduring growth brands soaked and soaked in niches before attaining scale. Even the ones who grew exponentially appeared to the mainstream to come out of nowhere.