Move Before You're Ready

Part of the ten principles series. Principle two: dreams without action stay dreams.

Thirteen years ago I was driving around New Zealand in an old silver Subaru Legacy wagon with my wife and our baby daughter. She turned one over there. The photos from that trip look like freedom: kingfish on a charter boat, throwing my girl in the air on a beach, the family at Lake Taupō at dusk. What the photos don’t show is that I was quietly struggling. There was no money in the business, and worse than that, there was no one to ask. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I knew it.

So I did something that, on paper, made no sense: I bought a David Reid Homes franchise. Not for the brand. I couldn’t have cared less about the brand. I bought it because it came with help. Templates, systems, people who’d been where I was and would answer the phone. I paid serious money, money I barely had, for the thing I write about constantly now: not having to learn everything the hard way.

Was I ready to make that call? Absolutely not. Was it a perfect decision? No, and that’s the point.

Trying is not a plan

There’s a difference between trying and committing, and your bank account knows which one you’re doing even when you don’t. Trying is circling the decision: researching one more option, waiting for the busy period to end, telling yourself you’ll start the systems overhaul when things settle down. Things never settle down. I’ve watched builders “try” their way through five years without one thing in the business actually changing.

Committing looks different. It’s a decision followed immediately by action big enough that going back gets expensive. Buying the franchise was that for me. Signing the lease. Hiring the first person before you feel safe. Booking the course and getting on the plane. The size of the action is what makes the decision real; a decision with no action attached is just a mood.

Imperfect, consistent, with intensity

Here’s what two decades of this has taught me: the quality of your first attempt matters far less than the fact of it, because action produces the one thing planning never can, which is information. You launch the rough version of the process and find out in a week what’s wrong with it. The bloke perfecting his version finds out in a year, if he ever ships it.

I watch this play out with builders and AI right now. One of our members, brand new to all of it, decided he wanted leads and just built his own Google Ads with AI walking him through it. Not ready. No idea, really. Within a week: an enquiry for a $250,000 renovation. Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a builder still researching the best way to start, and he’s been researching since Christmas.

Move imperfectly if you have to, but move consistently and with intensity. Small consistent action compounds. Sporadic perfect action doesn’t exist.

The fear reading

One more thing about that franchise decision, and every big move since: I was scared making all of them. Buying it, the first big spec build, hiring when I couldn’t quite afford it, starting Future Builder, standing on stages. Every single one, scared.

I’ve come to read the fear differently now. If a move matters, fear shows up, so its presence isn’t a stop sign, it’s usually confirmation you’ve found something worth doing. The moves I made comfortably are the ones I can’t even remember. The ones that scared me built everything I have.

This week: name the decision you’ve been “trying” at for more than three months. You already know what it is, it came to mind before you finished the sentence. Make the call this week, and attach an action to it big enough that backing out would embarrass you. Book it, sign it, announce it, pay for it.

You will not feel ready. You’ll be in an old Subaru with a baby in the back and no money, doing it anyway. That’s what ready actually looks like.