Are You Willing to Cut Your Losses?

I decided to take my afternoon coffee break at Barnes and Noble today for two reasons. First, the crazy girl who picked up my frappuccino and started drinking it yesterday at Starbucks is not here. And second, Barnes and Noble is actually a quieter place. After all, it is a book store. A book store with Starbucks coffee, I might add.

While I was waiting for my coffee to brew, I perused through Success Magazine. I liked what Sandra Bienkowski wrote, "The great entrepreneurs cut losses." How true. There are times in business you just have to cut your losses, whether it's a problem customer (they're the ones who are never quite happy with you), a product that just isn't profitable, or perhaps it's the whole business itself. Yes, that last one is a drastic measure, but you have to know when to fold 'em (as Kenny Rogers sang).

We cut our losses occasionally at Audiobag. We try a new music track in our online production music library, it doesn't sell, and we take it offline. We introduce a new service (mobile recording, for example), we find that it stretches us too thin, so we stop offering that service. We produce a podcast intro for a customer, select some background music, and the customer doesn't like it -- we recut it three more times, and he still doesn't like it. We tell him that Native American music isn't something we quite have a handle on and we refund his money, thus cutting our loss. Yes, we lose a customer, but we really never had him to begin with. We believe there's a company out there that is a perfect match and we wish him success.

That's the word that caught my eye while waiting for my coffee to brew. Success! It's a great word. It's a word I try for in all aspects of my life. And sometimes to achieve it, I have to let something go.