This is Stevea Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Today, we're going to address the question of when to shut down a small business.

We learn a lot at school and the college about how to do things so that we can get more.

But what they don't teach us is when to rein things in.

After all, if you're going to live an extraordinary life of working less and doing more, you need to know when enough is enough.

For example, one pet unicorn is great. Ten pet unicorns is even better. But a hundred unicorns,

too much. You can't take that much fertilizer to market each week, and unicorn burgers

aren't yet approved by the FDA. Listener Andy's business doesn't involve unicorns. Now, I don't know

what it does involve, maybe knitting, exciting underwear, but I'm fairly sure there are no unicorns.

Andy wrote in and asked, How do you know when it's time to pull the plug on a small business?

New listeners may not know this, but when I'm not being the get-it-done guy, my secret identity

is as a Harvard MBA, serial entrepreneur, and executive coach. So my answer comes from a combination

of first-hand experience, advising other entrepreneurs, and, of course, drinking too much coffee,

and not being fully responsible for what my fingers are typing.

First of all, know your affordable loss.

There's a wonderful concept from entrepreneurship research called affordable loss.

That's how much money, time, reputation, and opportunity cost you're prepared to lose when

you go into a project.

For example, you might decide that you're willing to risk $50,000 of your retirement savings on your new venture, but no more than that. If you didn't

set an affordable loss in advance for your business, you may have found yourself adding money

a little bit at a time, and if that's the case, stop now and decide now how much in total

you think you're willing to risk on your business in total.

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