The half-life of a business event

"We've been making progress in fits and starts!",
"Just one month ago we had great momentum!",
"When are you going to stop planning and get going?!"

If you hear these thoughts running through your head or business conversations,then you may be suffering from the side effects of the half-life of business events.

The half-life of business events is the observation that significant entrepreneurial business events will drop in business significance (measured by potential impact) with a half-life of roughly two weeks.

In other words, every two weeks, the business significance will decay 50%.

Whenever you have a good meeting or complete a powerful task or some other way create momentum you should think of yourself as having a fully charged battery.

The way to keep the battery fully charged is to immediately follow up with additional tasks that preserve and grow of the momentum of the original activity.

You can put a battery into storage by setting a date. Even then there is a gradual degradation as dates set far into the future are more likely to be moved and re-prioritized.

Think about it this way:

Every week that goes by your power bar will diminish by 25%.

Consider the following example:

You meet a prospect. Your meeting is positive and they are eager to proceed. You then drag your feet for two weeks getting a proposal out. You just lost 50% of the value of that initial meeting.

Why? Perhaps the prospect liked your idea so much that he contacted a competitor for some similar ideas. Perhaps other business events jumped up in priority. The prospect you spoke with might have been re-assigned other priorities in the business.

In short, the magical door was open. The timing was right, the message was on and the dollars were queued up. Pass through that door as quickly as possible! Dragging your feet increases the chances of the door slamming shut.

You can imagine how this rule applies not just to business development but to new hires, to business plans, raising money or signing up a new partner. Lack of action can be disastorous.

Carpe Diem! Seize the day!