Sometimes the strategic plan is called TRY HARDER: On grit, determination, and mentorship.

Awkward Engineer Creations has come a long way since from it's humble beginnings. We've built up supply chains, worked on web dev, made sales calls, studied the retail industry, created graphic designs, and more. Sometimes people ask us how we learned all this, coming from a Mech. Eng. background, and the answer boils down to one thing -

We tried.

Of course, it took some persistence and follow through, but in the grand scheme of things, it's been done before. People have launched new products. People have started companies. We're just trying to study what other people are already doing (sales, basic manufacturing, marketing, etc) take what already works, and then do that ourselves.

You want to know what's actually hard? Cold fusion. That's hard. It's something that hasn't been been done before, that might not be physically possible. And even if it is physically possible, it might not be technically feasible. And if it is technically feasible, it might not be commercially viable.

But we're not working on cold fusion. Or drug development. Or rocket science. (We used to design components for things that were launched by rockets, actually, so we've kinda sorta done rocket science in the past, but we digress...) We're just making and selling fun things that we want to see in the world.

So when we get stuck, one of the the best things our mentors can do for us is give us a metaphorical kick in the behind and make us realize that all we have to do is try harder. We were starting to sense a scalability problem, as we hadn't picked up any new major distributors in a while.

Our new strategy was to piggy back on sales reps in the toy and gift industry, and use them to achieve growth by reaching out to mom and pop stores, but our mentors had a few questions first.

"Well, do you think you've saturated the market for major channels?"

"No, but..."

"So how many more do you think you need to hit your goals for the year?"

"Maybe a dozen or so, but"

"And do you think that's possible?"

"Yes, but..."

And that was it. Sometimes you just need to hear the words come out of your own mouth. It's not impossible, you just need to try harder. So we went back to Google, did some research, and found a half dozen new companies to reach out to.

I'm often reminded of a saying I read once, about hiring practices... that people run out of hard work long before they run out of smarts.

So if you're starting up and new and wondering how to make it, just keep working. Sometimes the strategic plan is called TRY HARDER.