How Do You Decide When to Let Go?

[Jim Hutchinson]

When you start a new business or project, you put everything into it: all your energy, knowledge, learning as much as you can and as much of your available funds as possible. Basically, you put your best efforts into it in hopes of making it work for you.

After a few months, when you have not met your goals, you strive even harder and maybe even adjust your goals so they are easier to attain. Most new businesses will close within the first 5 years for various reasons. The biggest reason is lack of sales. If you make it past that 5 years, your chances of continuing for a long time are very good.

What if something happens and your sales do not meet your expectations or pay your bills? How long do you keep going before letting go and changing focus to another business?

For the website designers reading this, the natural progression is to do the designs, then start hosting the websites. That is how I got started in 1998. The hosting side of the business never made much profit, but basically paid for the hosting server. That gave me free hosting with full control to do anything I wanted, but never got to the point where I could afford to pay for help with marketing, programming, or anything else.

Recently I had to make a decision. After doing an analysis of the business health, I realized that the customer support, server monitoring and maintenance was costing me more time than I could pay for hosting. Sure new customers were coming in, but at such a slow pace that the new business did not add much to the existing. It just gave me more to do.

While I still have the sales pages online, they go to my hosting referral link instead of to my own registration page. All current customers have to move their sites so the servers can be shut down. While some are handling this well, others are very upset. Since I have multiple sites, the move is no walk in the park for me either, but the end result will be better than what I have worked on for so long, because now I can focus on managing sites instead of worrying about the server.

This can happen in any business, only with different circumstances.

So my question to you is, how do you decide when to let go?

[NewMom0208]

That is a very tough question but I'll try

I think that If you don't exhaust every resource you will never know for sure if it was time to change direction.
If you still think web hosting is what you want to do, you need to rethink your approach and reach out for help, who are successful "web hosts" and how do they do it? If you are just trying more and more if the same you can not expect a different result.
Maybe your marketing strategy needs fine tuning? How are you different, what is your added value?

If the answer to those and similar questions leaves you with a sense of emptiness, it might be time to change directions, evolve into something else.

You might need to go back to the basics and determine again how profitable your line of business really is. If it not worth your efforts, then it is time to open your horizons and embrace other ideas, go outside your comfort zone. Maybe this is what you mean by letting go...

But don't delay, if you linger you will suffer from leaving the old idea behind and you'll lack the energy, and optimism (and moneys) to start something new!

I’d encourage you to think about this as an opportunity to evolve, and not so much as letting go. Who knows? Maybe you’ll come up with a revolutionary idea about hosting services, or maybe you will become something entirely different.

I think you already made your decision (since you are already migrating customers), it just doesn’t need to be a bad thing. Think about it as an opportunity to evolve.

[Jim Hutchinson]

You are right in that this is an opportunity to evolve. Throughout the years I was mostly on the technical side of things, managing servers, writing programs, managing websites, supporting customers, etc.

While doing that, I spent a lot of time and money on marketing books, courses, videos, etc. I wanted to learn all I could about marketing to help build the business, which was supposed to provide a residual income. That never evolved to the point where I could outsource any of the marketing or support.

Looking at the larger companies to see what they offer, I set up a service that specialized in blog hosting and even allowed a 30 day free trial with free setup. Not even that made a difference large enough to keep it going.

As a result of the recent change, I made more in affiliate commissions in one week than I made from the hosting in several years. By moving my sites to a lower cost server, I lowered overhead while planning the next evolution.

One of the most important questions we need to ask ourselves is how we differ from other companies. I struggled with that a long time. There are hosting services so diverse that you could even run a virtual desktop.

The two things that my clients liked was the service and the honesty... I refuse to lie about what the clients get in terms of storage space and bandwidth, like the other companies do (saying *anything* is unlimited is a lie).

The changes:
* Instead of providing the hosting, I converted the links to my affiliate links and will promote hosting that way.
* Instead of doing the custom programming, I get the work in and hand it off to a programmer.
* Instead of monitoring and managing the server, sale and customer support, I let the affiliate company handle those.

This is all good since it allows me to focus on expanding into other areas.