“Don’t look back; something might be gaining on ya!” – Satchel Paige

I come from a long line of entrepreneurs – growing up I never knew anyone who had a job; everyone we knew owned their own businesses. When my mother said, “you can’t make money while you’re running scared,” she was sharing the wisdom of careful observation. She had watched generations of entrepreneurs, and understood the difference between those with the courage to grow and change and those who desperately tried to defend what they already had.

At Kinko’s I saw examples of both styles; some partners aggressively expanded, taking chances to open more stores, serve more customers and make more money. On rare occasions, these partners overextended themselves, but in the long run they prospered. Others started making some money with one or two stores and focused their efforts on protecting that revenue stream. They didn’t expand because they felt it was too expensive, but it wasn’t too expensive for the competition. Instead of protecting what they had, their defensive posture often caused their business to shrink.

There’s a fine line between courage and recklessness, and many entrepreneurs cannot distinguish this line – to their credit. Often, the difference is just a matter of perception anyway. If you bet right, the move was courageous. If you bet wrong, you were reckless. Fortunately, entrepreneurs often turn a deaf ear to other people’s cynicism; we have been told, “It can’t be done.” “There’s no market for a home computer.” “You cannot sell Xerox copies for pennies.”

It takes a lot of courage to start your own business, a lot of courage to stick with the business in tough times, and even more courage to change the business before it is necessary.

An entrepreneur must err on the side of trying new things. At Kinko’s our mistakes cost almost nothing, because the core business was profitable enough to sponsor experiments. So we had 1,000 laboratories trying new services, new products, and new methods of production. Assuming the core business could not sustain us forever, we invested those profits to help us discover the next source of profits.

Yet another kind of courage is required after you try things: the courage to recognize failure and move on. William Faulkner was a fearless, sometimes wildly experimental author. He advised writers of the need to “kill your darlings.” For example, sometimes you open an essay with a really witty sentence, but as the essay develops, the sentence no longer fits. It’s very hard for writers to cut that sentence, but it must be sacrificed for the quality of the whole.

Business owners know the feeling: you launch a new product that you really believe in. You give it lots of support and every chance to succeed, but it doesn’t take off, and it starts to degrade the morale of coworkers and your attention to other business needs. Do you have the courage to pull the plug, or do you let it linger too long and drag down everything around it?

You cannot make money while you’re running scared; you have to take some bold chances to grow your business. And sometimes you have to boldly abort a failed experiment. Don’t let the failures dampen your enthusiasm for experimentation, because it’s the owner’s job to look forward, not back.