***Make Your Goal to Succeed Big and Fail Small

If you’re in business, you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to occasionally fail. That’s okay, because that’s how you learn and how you get better and grow. The key is to minimize the impact of your mistakes and failures. Make your successes big and your failures small, and you’ll always come out ahead.
The best way to do this is to test before you implement. Never assume that any idea will work; always test it for proof. This includes marketing ideas, product ideas, operational systems, and anything else that will affect your company.
Testing allows you to keep your failures small and make your successes big. Take marketing as an example: Don’t go out and blow your entire budget on one idea. Let’s say you have three different marketing ideas and you’re not sure which one will work the best. Your total budget for the year is $100,000. Instead of picking one of those ideas and taking a chance on spending your entire $100,000 on it, test all three with budgets of $10,000 each. When you’re finished testing, you’ll know which idea works the best, and you’ll still have $70,000 left to spend on it. And if you weren’t satisfied with the results from all three ideas, you can come up with something different that you can test and possibly implement.

Or let’s say you only have one idea and a budget of $100,000. Test it on a small scale anyway, because that will tell you whether or not it’s going to work. If you spend $10,000 on the test and you’re satisfied with the results, great—roll it out on a larger scale. But if you aren’t satisfied, at least you’ll have $90,000 left to use when you come up with another idea.

You can and should apply the testing concept to any part of your company, including product development, employee recognition and compensation, organizational structure, and general operations.

If you test something that doesn’t work and it fails, you didn’t lose. You simply made an investment to find out whether you should do a larger implementation. The knowledge you gained was worth the money you spent.

There will be situations when you don’t have time to test, when you just have to go with your gut because there’s no other choice and you have to move quickly. There will be other times when you choose to follow your instincts because the risk is low. But if you could have test and you chose not to, don’t complain if you lose—but more important, don’t get cocky if you win.