The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: Ending A Project & Relationship
2024 was a heck of a rough year. It took me many months into 2025 to reflect on this. I’ve written about continuing family issues, personal cash flow and cost structure issues due to unexpected personal & real estate HVAC costs + unpaid account receivables from some government entities who will remain unnamed. We had some major breakthroughs in the investment holding costs that will be hugely beneficial in the future but were a massive drain on our coffers in 2024.
But on top of all this stress, was an initiative we took on in 2023. One of our small direct investments we did in 2021 was in the midst of shutting down in 2023, so we offered to take it to a new region as a sort of JV to keep it alive. We wrote up the contract and assigned people to it, even found an executive. Everyone went into this excited as it seemed tailor made for the region & the feedback we got from everyone we spoke to was incredibly good.
We ran into personnel issues as the executive we brought on board was a disaster. We couldn’t find another replacement executive and we got distracted with all the other initiatives we had going on. By mid-June of 2024 it was turning into a massive mess. We tried restarting it and then tried killing it in the middle of the year, but after some contentious calls, we agreed to kick it off again.
But it was stalled again by the end of the year. Again. And understandably frustrations & anger were very high from the other side. Every angry email or messenger ping was a stab at my heart, because I understood. My morale would drop immediately when I saw these because I bore some responsibility but could not affect what was happening on the ground in the region. I had no answers which made it even worse. Communication was awful from our side, unfortunately.
I had a gut feeling even in 2023 that this was going to be an issue as it was just not top of our priorities. But I kept overruling this feeling every time in a flight of optimism. In my heart of hearts, I just did not think it would work out. Yet I did not have the guts to just end it definitively. This turned into a complete disastrous mess and waste of money and time.
God, especially what a waste of everyone’s time. And the loss of a relationship and reputational damage to boot. Uggh……one of the biggest messes I’ve been involved with in my 25 year old business career.
But I’ve drawn some hard lessons from this. As per Derek Siver’s frame, when you look at opportunities, “If it’s not a ‘Hell yeah, it’s a hell No’”. We were way too optimistic and it was not close enough to our core business to really focus on it. Yet we said yes. While we had good intentions, we were not resourced well enough for this initiative to be successful. Whether it was a point person, or project management lead or even some larger budget to match the opportunity. Looking back, this was stillborn at the start. Hope is not a strategy.
Also as a reminder for why it’s critical to have a very clear plan and resourcing for this. And of course, have a clear walk away point. You would think at my age and some business experience, this would not happen but here we are again. Humble pie.