Perseverance for Data

            This week, I was talking with my wife about promoting her business. Starting a new business is a challenging and frustrating process, but spreading the word about it is the hardest part. A lot of time and energy gets put into figuring out how to reach potential customers and it can be disheartening when it doesn’t pay off.

            The important thing to remember, though, is that a business is a long-term prospect, as is figuring out what works for you. Perseverance is extremely important, as well as collecting additional data before jumping to conclusions.

            Colleen was disappointed in a couple of marketing techniques she’d tried, without seeing any improvement in her business. She compared what she’d done to the one method she know has worked, which was getting listed on a website – far less time and work than her other, more creative attempts. I told her that these new attempts needed more testing before she ruled them out as effective. She didn’t have enough data to make the decision.

            To demonstrate my point, I pulled out a coin and told her to make a tally chart – heads vs tails. I explained what I had learned about probability in grade five; if you flip a coin enough times, it will eventually land on both sides the same number of times.

            I started flipping the coin. The first three flips were all heads, and we finally got a tails on the fourth flip. At this point, I asked Colleen what side the coin was most likely to land on next, based on the data we had. She said heads, of course – and that’s what we got.

            We kept on flipping the coin and the heads column kept a lead, but tails did catch up a little. With heads at seven and tails at six, I asked again – based on the data, what is the most likely side of the coin? Heads again.

            Tails finally caught up with heads when they had both landed nine times. At this point, I explained again that, however many times we flipped the coin, it would eventually even out. However, until we had gathered enough data, we had no way of knowing that – or, in our case, knowing if it was true.

            Applying this to marketing methods, I explained (or would have if Colleen hadn’t already figured out on her own) that having a clever marketing method not yield any results once or twice does not provide enough information to call it faulty. Perseverance is required so that enough data may be gained to determine what does and doesn’t work. Then, a decision to continue or discontinue the method may be made.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.