The Danger of Putting Outputs Before Outcomes in Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs are notorious for getting lost in outputs. The social media posts. The emails that need to be written. The blogs. The videos. The tech-stack. But the danger of putting outputs before outcomes in entrepreneurship is that one can quickly lose sight of where one is at and end up in a never-ending cycle of doing without achieving. Kind of like a rudderless boat.

How does one fall into the outputs trap?

Let’s say you are contemplating a new venture or a project such as creating a course in your business or a new business that is a course or a coaching program.

So typically you would start by either signing up for someone else’s course who is a big name in the industry to learn all that you can. Fair call. It’s good to get started with someone with high visibility to get the full framework.

Then you would start researching all the various platforms, whilst also juggling what you do currently and also learning from this person who has trialed and errored their way for years and have it dialed in. The thing to note with this is that the learning phase cannot be taken away from others just because the path has been walked before by someone with more experience and is therefore their own lived experience.

So the learning phase ends up being a little like drinking out of a fire hose and an inability to know exactly what step needs to come first. Because the thing is, in entrepreneurship, things don’t come neatly arranged like a corporate onboarding plan.

It leads to overwhelm and potentially even burnout resulting in most people quitting before they are even able to achieve anything. They will mostly blame the person who created the course, without taking responsibility for their own actions or the lack thereof.

The cycle of tech stack decisions begins and tools end up being a hot topic in every discussion. The issue is that tools will not fix the funnel, it will not fix the offer and it certainly will not fix the outcome. Tools are just that, an enabler. Just like ChatGPT, you need to enter the correct inputs for it to deliver the right outputs. However, they are not to be confused with the right outcome.

So what might an outcome look like versus an output?

But if you haven’t taken sailing lessons, it’s going to be hard to get to the destination so you ask experienced sailors and they give you an A-Z guide.

Okay so now you know what all you need and so you go and get everything you need. But wait you haven’t yet worked out what speed you need to travel at, the best way to use a compass, and a way to chart your trip to your destination.

I won’t elaborate much further on what’s going to happen if one was to set sail without this.

So let’s bring this analogy back to an online business.

Let’s say you have a dollar figure in mind of what you might charge for your first gig. Let’s say it was $497 just to use as an example. Let’s say you really want to make $20,000 this year. How would you reverse engineer this?

Well, you would need to sell $20,000 / $497 = 40 of those courses.

To sell 40 of the $497 offer, you would need to calculate your best-estimated conversion rate. Let’s go with a conversion rate of about 20% for a well dialed in offer.

To convert 20% of people to get to 40, you would need to divide 40 by 20% which is 200 people on a series of a couple of webinars of, let’s say, 100 people each. This is niche specific so it might differ based on how good your offer is, by the way, and your niche.

If you increase or decrease your conversion rate based on how well you can package and sell your offer, it will give you a different number, but we are basing it on assuming you have your offer dialed in at this point.

But let’s keep rolling for the sake of hypothesizing.

So then you need to work out the timings. To get to $20,000 by say end of the year, you would need to have 200 people converting at 20% to get to 40 people.

So now you have a specific outcome. You can increase this over time, but this is for if you are just starting out. It’s a good baseline number to aim for and you can increase it slightly or decrease it.

Now that you know the number, what the conversion rate is, how many people, and at what cost, you can start to put together an offer around the price.

The way to think about your offer is to think about the one problem you can solve rather than a whole host of problems. The one problem needs to be solved in a variety of different ways ideally. If you would like to know how to create an offer, get in touch by either DM’ing me or booking a time to talk.

What if you don’t have any clients and you are starting out? Well, no clients, no problem because you can research most things using free tools at your fingertips to develop your messaging.

This market research is about uncovering your audience’s pain points so that your offer can be crafted around the pain points. This is the absolute basic foundation of what you need first.

Once you know what these pain points are, you would then take a considered approach to develop a content framework using a few common themes that emerge.

Finally, you would test out the content that has been created around the pain points. Once this is done, one will have a good idea of what messaging works well with the audience around the pain points that were uncovered.

By reverse engineering the content creation process by first understanding your client’s pain points, developing message testing, and then validating your offer, you will be able to develop a realistic timeline of when to launch your course.

So, in conclusion, the danger of putting outputs before outcomes in entrepreneurship will leave you chasing your tail with things that will have no benefit whatsoever and keep you in a state of ‘busy’ without actually accomplishing anything.