One of the things I love most about Quora are all the very smart and interesting people who bring their incredible knowledge to the platform. One such person was a post by David Rose who introduced the Society for Effectual Action to Quora. If you know me, I’m somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to causes because so many are built around a false premise. I wanted to write this to explain why this concept of Effectual Action is important to me and I plan to learn a lot more. The moment I read David’s post, I had trouble putting it down.

When I began my entrepreneurial journey, I dove headfirst into my concept. It was right after I acquired my first company, but wanted to do something else. I didn’t stop to think much about what could go wrong. I was on a mission. I had the good sense to care a lot about due diligence, but I was in my twenties and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I asked for as much advice as I could find, but there were a lot of unknowns that I should have spent more time exploring.

As the years passed and I went through one venture after another, something happened along the way. “What if?” morphed from small letters to, “WHAT IF?” in big letters as a central theme. I began to think of my entrepreneurial journey as the steps to solving small rather than large problems. I’ve always been an inversion thinker, when I tend to worry about what can go wrong in a venture and fix that first. Inversion thinking was a great starting point on my entrepreneurial journey. We’ve written about it before, but here is the original article by James Clear.

When we founded Exotics at Redmond Town Center we had no idea we’d become the largest weekly gathering of rare and exotic cars in the US. We built it by solving the problems that caused others to fail before we began. But even that wasn’t enough and this is where Effectual Action took over, without us knowing or defining it. We knew we wanted to meet with other enthusiasts, but we didn’t know what we’d become. So, we started out small and solved each problem and adjusted our mission as we grew, based on what we learned.

What people don’t see are all the tiny failure that were a part of our success and we had many. We tried live broadcasts, drives, dinners, meet-ups, remote gatherings, all to see what would and wouldn’t lead in a new direction. Every other experiment failed, but they were tiny failures and nobody noticed. Yet, each tiny failure shaped E@RTC into what it has become today.

We’re building Middlerock much the same way. Who needs another consulting company anyway, right? We don’t want to be like the others and bring our advice based on not just our direct experience, but also our massive number of professional connections who can also give us guidance. When we don’t have an answer for a client, we have thousands of professional contacts who can help.

My Tom on Entrepreneurship page on Quora began over the Christmas holiday 2019. As of today it’s five months old. It started out slow at first, attracting followers at a rate of between 50 and 70 followers a day. We were not knocking it out of the park, and besides, it was an experiment, like everything else we try. I kept posting, writing, trying new things, and slowly it began to take shape.

Over time, the number of followers began to compound as word got out. It took a few months before we were picked up by contributors who had large followings and they followed us, which brought us more followers and so on. In just the last seventeen days alone, we’ve added 5,000 followers to the page. We have no idea if we’re going to sustain that growth, but we hit a jump somewhere. Now we just have to figure out what we did right.

We’re also about to begin a Zoom call series as an experiment with entrepreneurs. It’s completely free with no obligation and you don’t have to say a word if you don’t want. It’s aimed at answering questions for entrepreneurs and helping them get unstuck when they are stuck. We have no idea where it will lead of if it will be another failed experiment, but this is what Effectual Action is all about. It’s trial and error, and trial again until we figure it out. To join our Zoom series, just write us at zoom@middlerock.com and we’ll add you to the list. We want you to join us because we’re on an entreprenrual journey together and we love sharing what we’ve learned. It’s the core of Middlerock and what we’re all about in the first place.