Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Very few things in my life took me out of my comfort zone so much as when a few years back I traveled with a group of friends to learn to fly a paraglider. Trips with my friends are chosen by voting, and, needless to say, that year I lost.

So I travelled to Tafí del Valle in Tucuman, Argentina, pretty scared, but determined to start the course, which I knew started on a totally flat place.  I thought the next step was to fly in tandem with a professor and that I was willing to try. Then when the time came to fly on my own, I would see what I did.

The experience was very interesting and what I will do now is write a series of four posts connecting what I lived while learning to fly with the stages of founding and starting up a company.

Let’s start by the beginning. As expected, the first lesson started in a pretty flat field. As the paraglider needs a slope to take off, there was no risk of flying at all. But the reality is that, as this video shows, even on a flat surface it was a lot more difficult than I thought!

The wing (that is how the top part of a paraglider is called) was impossible to control. The wind took me anyway he wanted. But what we were really doing was preparing for what was next.

In the process of starting up a project, preparation is also essential. For several reasons:

1) Overcome fear: The same as with the paraglider, becoming entrepreneurs we have to face many unknowns. From the market reaction to your product/service, to the difficulties of raising capital. In all aspects of life, being prepared helps us to beat the fear of trying something new.

2) The fact that you want to does not mean you can: You may want to start from the top of a mountain, but if you don’t know how to raise the wing from the floor you are not going to get too far. In entrepreneurship, the fact that you had an idea does not make you the right person to be the one to found a company. That right has to be won. And it is won by preparation. I always say when I give talks that the biggest challenge with the investors of Officenet was not to convince them that we had a good idea but to get them to accept that this two 25 year-olds were the best founders and managers for the new company. So we worked for many months, learning as much as we could about the office supplies industry.

3) Make a small-scale test: Having experienced, at least in a small scale, the feeling of hanging from a paraglider wing gave me, without actually flying, a lot of clues about what was coming next. In the same fashion, putting together a pilot or running a small market test helps a lot to anticipate what we will encounter later on and be prepared. Later in the process of growing a business that still holds true. In Officenet we try a lot to test in small scale first all changes we decide to make to our business.

4) Model to understand: Here the metaphor of paragliding is far fetched, but something I find to be crucial in the preparation of a start up is modelling it financially (at the end of the day I am indeed an Excel-nerd!). Doing it teaches you a lot about what are the key variables that “leverage” the business. You can separate clearly what has a huge impact in the success or failure of the project from what is secondary. That way you can focus the effort in preparing the key areas.

5) Sometimes preparation is so difficult or boring then things turn out easier than we thought: In this case, to me the wing was totally uncontrollable! All that practice on the flat field was totally frustrating. When you are putting together a start up it’s the same. I don’t know anyone who likes the part of writing a Business Plan. But, by contrast, as I found out with surprise later that day, when the real thing starts it turns out to be so much more fun. But that is the subject of the next post, in a couple of days.

Photo: Marcin Wichary