Time: Your Most Expensive Expense

Business people waste a lot of time worrying about spending money.  By conserving cash, the thinking goes, they are protecting their most precious and scarce resource.  As an investor in startup companies, I see this pattern play out again and again: leaders that invest too slowly in growth, believing this is a safe approach.

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, squeezing pennies has simply become a losing formula.  In fact, the most valuable and scare resource is not money; it’s time.  A plan that fearfully conserves is actually far more risky than one of heavy investment in innovation and scale.

If you have a great idea to launch a business or a new strategy to grow an existing one, chances are that hundreds of others around the world have the same idea.   The question becomes, who will get there first?  Results in business are often binary – the winner takes all.  So any friction that slows down your sprint to the finish line becomes an albatross that restricts your ability to achieve.

Unlike time, money is a replaceable asset.  You can create more through revenue, loans, or investment.   Time, on the other hand, cannot be replenished.  While it doesn’t show up on accounting statements, it is your most precious — and limited — commodity.

Most people overlook the importance of speed.  They don’t consider the opportunity cost of squandered time, lost opportunity, or forgoing competitive advantage.  They don’t realize that most ideas have a limited shelf life, and that failure is too often the result of simply moving too slowly.

Concerned about spending, an entrepreneur recently asked me if he should spend an extra $10,000 on contractors to launch his product two weeks earlier.  My response: “What is the cost of waiting the extra two weeks?   Lost customers?  Slower company growth?  Handing over competitive advantage?  In hard dollars, if you have the rest of your 20 people working for an extra 14 days, what happens to the overall project cost?”  Turns out, spending “more” equated to actually spending less when looking at the big picture.  More importantly, it allowed this startup leader to hit the market faster.

Vince Lombardi famously said, “In my entire career, I never lost a single game… I just ran out of time.”  If you’re looking to seize the next level, worry less about investing in growth and worry a whole lot more about letting time slip through your fingers.  As you deeply consider the impact of waiting, you’ll want to strap on your running shoes and begin to sprint.

Read More

New Thinking for the New Era of Business

Albert Einstein famously noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.” In our post-COVID world of ...

When an Astronaut Needs a Pen

Ever get stuck on a problem, only to realize you're solving for the wrong thing? That's exactly what happened when the rocket scientists at NASA ...

How Shake Shack Drives Innovation

Do you prefer the crispy mozzarella, tempura watercress, and black garlic mayonnaise cheeseburger or the pumpkin mustard, bacon, cranberries, and sage hot dog? For something ...

Lady Gaga’s Secret to Creativity

Just before she won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, I watched Lady Gaga dazzle the live audience with a pitch perfect performance of ...

Creativity: Does Size Matter?

For some reason, we’ve been taught that for creativity and innovation to count they need to have a magnitude the size of the 1989 San ...

The Lexicon of Creativity

There’s more confusion around the meaning of the word innovation than the chaos at the airline ticket counter after a cancelled flight. Is there a difference between ...

The Brain Science of Becoming More Creative

When we hear stories about iconic leaders like Salesforce.com’s founder Marc Benioff, or widely celebrated virtuosos like Lin-Manuel Miranda for that matter, we immediately think ...

Correct the Overcorrect

When the misguided leaders at Enron, Tyco and Worldcom committed fraud and marred their shareholders with huge losses, the Securities and Exchange Commission rightfully swooped ...

Learning to Color

Fact: Creativity has become the most needed skill in business. It’s gone from a nice-to-have to becoming mission-critical. Fact: Creativity is a learnable skill. All humans have ...