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The 3 Stages of Failure
The 3 Stages of Failure
This framework helps clarify things by breaking down challenges into three
stages of failure:
In the rest of this article, I’ll share a story, solution, and summary for each
stage of failure. My hope is that the 3 Stages of Failure framework will help
you navigate the tricky decision of deciding when to quit and when to stick
with it. It's not perfect, but I hope you find it to be useful.
Stage 1: A Failure of Tactics
“I was literally working 80 to 100 hours a week for 15 years. I was a single
parent of two kids, believe it or not. I was very sick. I was on all kinds of
antidepressants and so forth…
I was going to miss a payroll and lose my entire company. If you can just
imagine a nervous wreck, physical wreck, and then multiply that by ten,
that’s what I was. It was a horrible time.”
One night, just before he was about to miss payroll, Carpenter had a
realization. His business was struggling because it completely lacked the
systems it needed to achieve optimal performance. In Carpenter’s words,
“We were having all kinds of problems because everybody was doing it the
way that they thought was best.”
Carpenter reasoned that if he could perfect his systems, then his staff could
spend each day following best practices instead of constantly putting out
fires. He immediately began writing down every process within the business.
“For instance,” he said. “We have a nine-step procedure for answering the
phone at the front desk. Everybody does it that way, it’s 100% the best way
to do it, and we’ve taken an organic system and made it mechanical, and
made it perfect.”
Over the next two years, Carpenter recorded and revised every process in the
company. How to make a sales presentation. How to deposit a check. How to
pay client invoices. How to process payroll. He created a manual that any
employee could pick up and follow for any procedure within the company—
system by system, step by step.
What happened?
Carpenter’s workweek rapidly decreased from 100 hours per week to less
than 10 hours per week. He was no longer needed to handle every emergency
because there was a procedure to guide employees in each situation. As the
quality of their work improved, Centratel raised their prices and the
company's profit margin exploded to 40 percent.