Lots of ex-finance professionals are in the process of reinventing themselves as entrepreneurs – and more than a few of them will find their way to China. A favorite phrase of brokers and investments bankers was ‘pull the trigger’ to refer to placing an order or executing the trade. Sample usage: “That buy-side analyst who was looking at XYZ Inc. for 3 weeks finally pulled the trigger yesterday”.

Just because Finance is dead as an industry doesn’t mean we have to give up the cool lingo, so let’s repurpose the shooting/execution analogy.

Let’s say you have a cool idea for a new China business. Do you pull the trigger now, or keep your powder dry and wait for a clearer view of the target?

There are two views on starting a new business during troubled times.

The argument for pulling the trigger now

Talent & resources are cheap and plentiful. Anyone who looked for a web programmer or marketing pro in 2006 knows just how subject the HR market is to bottle-necks. The same goes for office space, advertising space and other business necessities. One of the few bright spots in a recession is that everything and everyone is plentiful and cheap – except buyers. They are scarce and cheap (the BAD kind of cheap).

Crisis is the mother of solution. Entrepreneurs solve problems – and now is precisely the time when existing solutions are breaking down and failing. People with good ideas are going to be the new leaders and benefit the most from the inevitable recovery.

Beat the competition to the punch – Ok, so we’re breaking with the firearms analogy, but you know what we mean. New ideas need to compete for limited mindshare and the pool of early adopters. Your cool new social networking idea may be better than the new twitter (Newter? Hmm) but if you sit on it too long you may find that the market can only digest a limited number of similar services. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said – ‘If you’re not first, you’re last’. (Editor’s note – Not Lincoln. Ricky Bobby/Will Ferrel from Talladega Nights.) Being the second guy with a better solution is not always a successful strategy. Get out there now while the timid are fretting and cowering under the bed.

The arguments for keeping your powder dry.

Shooting in the dark. It’s still unclear what the big problems will be, much less which solutions are going to work. Building a better mousetrap doesn’t help when your problem is a hole in the roof. We don’t yet have sufficient transparency or understanding of what this crisis really looks like, when it will hit bottom or whom it will take down with it. Trying to build a long-term solution to a problem that is still unfolding has an unknown risk factor and a low chance of success. If you shoot in the dark, you may hit nothing – or you may hit your own people.


Don’t try to catch a falling sword. Another finance-industry aphorism, the meaning here is that you are in the right place at the wrong time you will get killed. The guy who invests big on the right technology or new idea is still going to go bust if he runs out of money before the market is ready for him. If you want to live another day, then sometimes you have to run away. Run away and hide under the bed until the bad times are over. It’s not manly, but it can be a surprisingly effective strategy.

Worse may be on the way. Just because things look bleak now doesn’t mean that they can’t get worse. Whomever said, ‘it’s always darkest right before the dawn’ was simply, factually WRONG. It’s actually pretty light just before the dawn. It’s always darkest before the tornado. The horrible, horrible tornado of doom. And if you are in the entrepreneurial trailer-park when it hits then YOU will be that fat guy on CNN pointing at your rubble-pile and saying how you never saw it coming. Let me help you out, Bubba-Jim. It’s coming.

The argument against shooting yourself in the foot

There are good reasons to pull the trigger and strong arguments for keeping your pistol holstered. The danger here is attempting to do both at once – otherwise known as shooting yourself in the foot. In entrepreneur terms, this means telling the world about your idea but not committing to the execution. This happens far more often than people realize, and is particularly dangerous in China where start-up costs tend to be lower and lots of talent is floating around with time to kill. Never start a business without a solid plan for locking in some type of value-adding competitive advantage. If your whole business idea centers on a new process, method or other form of intellectual property, then you may loose control of it the moment you have finished describing it. Keeping your powder dry may be OK and pulling the trigger might work. Shooting your mouth off is never a good strategy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:03 am and is filed under Expatreprenuership, Bear wrestling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.