First 72 hours are the most important.

In the Wild

After you realize you are in a situation where will need to survive, you need to act quickly to make decisions that will keep you alive. Your first 72 hours out in the wilderness is when you have the most energy and will have the easiest time doing tasks that will keep you alive. If you can establish shelter, water and food in the first 72 hours, the chances you will get out alive will greatly increase.
I will follow the “Rule of 3’s” when making decisions on where to put my precious energy:

1. If conditions are harsh, you may only be able to survive for 3 hours without shelter
2. You can’t go 3 days without water
3. Your body will shut down after 3 weeks without food.

I have 3 days to become self sufficient with food, water and shelter.
 

 
 

In Business

According to INC Magazine, 75% of businesses fail within the first three years. And most people who get dumped in the middle of the wilderness with no food or water sink or swim after the first 72 hours. This is not a coincidence. Strong Beginnings in business and survival are all about using the finite resources of your energy to set up a structure that produces above and beyond your individual/personal production capabilities. But that structure has to be built before your energy, drive, passion and enthusiasm are overtaxed and you burn out. Your goal as a business owner is to build something that is bigger and more productive than you are as an individual. If that is not your goal, you need to re-evaluate your decision to start a company. This is why you need to build a sustainable business that can run without needing your motivation to keep it alive. The average business owner has around 3 years to build a sustainable system before the financial or emotional stress starts to degrade his or her ability to make rational and solid decisions for the business.
 
Getting Started
The first three years of your company’s existence are a critical time – you’re developing your brand, your customer base, your revenue model, your vision, reputation, and strategy. This is the time to make sure you’ve got the essentials in place – that you know who you are, what you want, where you’re going, and how you want to get there. In survival training, we’d say that this is the time to focus on your top three priorities: shelter, water, and food. Most people get those backwards (food, water, shelter), but here’s why they belong in that order:
 
Shelter – In extreme cold or extreme heat, you may be able to live three hours without shelter. You can live up to three days without water, and up to three weeks without food. This isn’t an idle parallel: In the fiercely competitive business world, you won’t get much of anywhere without a compelling brand. Your brand is more than just your font choices or fancy graphics – it’s the idea of what your company is, what it represents; it’s an encapsulation of your vision, direction, mission, purpose, and values boiled down and distilled. Your brand and what you represent to the rest of the world is the heart of your business. Money is easy to make, but your brand is your shelter. It is what will cause people to follow you.  Ultimately, it’s what protects you from the storm of distractions that aren’t part of your brand — from the wrong turns, wrong choices, wrong people, and wrong focuses that swamp too many companies in their infancy. You need a brand first to protect who you are and where you’re going. Everything else will follow from that.
 
Water – Once you’ve got a shelter built, it’s time to start thinking hard about a water source. Water isn’t money; it’s customers. If you’ve got your brand constructed correctly, you should already have at least a vague idea of who your target customer is. Now is the time to sharpen that vague idea – now, now, now, before you get three years down the road and find that your water source has gotten so polluted it’s hard to even see the right customers under all the sludge. Like thinking any food in the wild is safe, companies that start with an “any customer is the right customer” mentality are actually poisoning themselves – weakening their marketing with lack of direction, and infusing their sales processes with the flavor of desperation. After you establish your brand, refine who your target customer is right away, and keep refining and purifying it throughout the life of your company. Once you have been able to effectively and easily connect with your target market, you can begin to develop ways to connect with more people. Many times, businesses that can’t target and acquire a specific customer type have a hard time learning what it takes to acquire a wider audience.
 
Food – Food is actually the last of your three major concerns. Remember, you can survive three weeks without food — and even a minimally-funded company should be able to survive at least the first three months without a fresh influx of money. Even if you’re on a shorter timeline and you’ve got to start making money within the first few weeks, the same principles apply. You must know your brand (shelter) and your target customer (water) in order to ever begin to pursue cashflow (food).
 
 
Balance
As you take your first steps in business, you’ll have to continually balance having a brilliant business plan and maintaining the energy and momentum necessary to keep moving forward. You need to be calculated in the steps that you take, but you need to take them quickly and energetically. Too much planning – developing an overcomplicated early business model – can be fatal to your forward momentum. Alternatively, too little planning can keep you spinning your wheels and lead to making bad decisions that kill your business early on.
Most business gurus will pick on you if you don’t have a five-year, ten-year, (hundred-and-ten-year…) business plan. People seem to think that the plan is the end game and that if you just set out the perfect plan and then color very carefully within the lines, you will eventually be successful. Maybe, but more likely you’re going to run out of time, energy, or money before your perfect plan comes to fruition. On the flip side, in business counter-culture, you see visionaries all the time who “throw things at the wall” without a detailed plan (or any plan) and their business ideas stick. Not well, but they do. This is because what those people lack in planning and strategy, they make up for in energy and speedy execution. Since they’re flying without any kind of a road map, they might eventually drive the business right off a cliff; but they start well – in fact, they start better than most “long-term planners” ever do. Your goal is to balance the two extremes: You need a smart plan, but initially, it needs to be simple enough to execute “fast and dirty” with the resources, energy, and momentum you’ve got right now. As your resources, energy, and momentum grow, you add detail, depth, and complication (the right kind of complication) to the plan. The more you can balance a brilliant plan and a heart full of energy to execute it, the more successful you will become in your initial steps. This combination of logical plan and decisive action is what will protect you from “the elements” and will make sure your growth is sustainable.
 
Let’s take an example from my illustrious wilderness career, in which I was a victim of both too much planning (an overly ambitious plan) and not enough (a poorly thought-out schedule and overestimation of my own energy resources):
For fun, I occasionally like to challenge myself to go, largely unsupplied, out into the wild to hone and sharpen my skills. One time, I set off for one of these “challenge camping” expeditions on the cusp of an approaching storm. My challenge for the evening was to build a shelter out of natural materials to weather that night’s…weather. Normally, if I were in a real survival circumstance, I would try to find a natural shelter or build something simple but effective. That evening, however, I already decided I was going to try to build a wikiup.
Wikiups are great shelters, but require a lot of gathering and assembly. Thinking I was the master of the universe, I drove out to a remote location (late in the day), hiked a little (thankfully not very far) and started mastering the universe. After the first hour of constructing my shelter, I had a bare-bones frame and a few supports. It looked like the beginning of a giant, upside-down basket. Within that hour, however, the temperature had dropped, it had started to rain, and it had gotten much, much darker. Half hour later, I was rushing to drag wood and boughs through the pitch dark in pouring rain. As cold as it was, I realized that if I planned on sleeping warm at all, I had to get a fire started and dry out, but I was still a good hour or three from making a successful wikiup. With my core temperature dropping and the rain picking up, I gave up on my “no supplies survival challenge” and got the emergency tools out of my backup kit. Banking on my success, I’d packed light (very light), so the kit consisted of only an emergency blanket, a flashlight, a knife, and a fire-starter. I put the emergency blanket around what was made of the wikiup and found a few dry twigs. Another hour later, I was huddled around a wet and dying mini fire with an emergency blanket tearing apart in the wind and my unfinished shelter letting what seemed like every raindrop in existence into my sleeping space. Nature had utterly kicked my butt. At least smart enough to know it was time to cut my losses, I bailed on the whole exercise and slept through the storm in my car.
The moral isn’t hard to decipher: I went in with totally unrealistic expectations of my time and energy resources, and a detailed but far too complicated plan. Building a simpler shelter (a brand that sticks to a few simple basics) and carefully plotting out my time and energy resources (remember, all the planning in the world is no good if your business runs out of momentum early on) would have meant the difference between (in this case) a successful survival exercise and a failed one. If I had given myself ample time and a more realistic challenge, I wouldn’t have found myself sleeping in my car that night. In a real business/survival circumstance, those first few hours/days can make the difference between being successful and failing. Make sure you get your priorities right, build a simple startup plan, and accurately gauge your time and energy resources. It’ll make all the difference.
 
 

When constructing a startup plan for your business or vertical, it’s easier to start with a milestone in mind. Let’s say, in order to hit profitability, you need 100 new customers. Set yourself a deadline and reverse engineer your goal back to your daily energy expenditure. For instance, if I need to make 100 customers in 1 year, I will need to acquire almost 2 customers a week. In order to land 2 customers a week, you might need to contact 30 people. To accomplish your goal, you will need to contact 6 people a day. You will need to weigh this task against your resources and energy. If the goal you set is not realistic, then you need to re-adjust till it is.

 
 
Sustainability
When you start your new business, make new business deals, or start any new venture in your current company, you want to make sure you establish it with a very solid core. The first three years of your company’s existence is one of the most critical times. By the time you have established your reputation, model and strategy, it is much harder to pull yourself in a different direction. You need to use your early momentum and enthusiasm to build tools, structures and teams that will support and add their own momentum to your business once your initial burst of energy and resources fade.
 
On my personal business journey, I remember that in my first year I felt like the world was ours to own. We had an idea and were great at what we did, and nothing could stop us. I focused all of that early enthusiasm and energy into growing the business (getting more clients) and working on projects, but I never once thought about trying to create solid processes for running a business. This meant that when fires would arise or tasks needed completing, guess who did all the work? (If you’re pointing at me, kudos to you – you’re already smarter than I was.) I didn’t plan on delegation and I didn’t structure my company to need it – actually, it needed it badly; I just didn’t see it at the time. I was so confident in my own abilities and “boundless” energy resources that by the time I hit year two, I was working 80+hour weeks, barely sleeping, and eating takeout for every meal.
 
 

Camping with others always makes things easier. Camping solo means you will be working harder

 
 
Suddenly, what I had previously referred to as “amazing opportunities” became “just another stupid task I have to do.” Without the proper balance of running a business and running around a business, I was quickly becoming bitter and overwhelmed. My business only ran when I was running it. Listen: When you own a business (especially a startup), it’s easy to think that you’ll save money and be more efficient if you carry all the responsibility. The biggest problem with this way of thinking is that money is a limitless resource; your time and energy are not. Repeat this with me: You can always make more money. You can’t EVER increase your own personal energy resources or time. They are limited. Spend them wisely in building a structure that runs without you turning the hamster wheel. As in the wilderness, if you don’t spend your energy on sustainable living or getting found, you will quickly find that your energy drains. Without a business structure that includes shelter, water, and food, and is non-dependent on your constant personal energy output, you will lose the survival challenge.
 

7 reasons why businesses fail in the first three years

1. Lack of target client understanding
2. Lack of planning
3. Lack of cash flow
4. Lack of understanding their industry
5. Lack of processes and structure
6. Lack of differentiation
7. Lack of team management

 
 
How you can increase your sustainability  in 3 steps
 

1. Make a list of areas of your business where you are required for it to operate.
2. On that list, write a solution for how you can create a structure that doesn’t require your energy
3. Take that list and write out a schedule for what changes you can realistically make and when.