How Your Backup Plan May Sabotage Your Entrepreneurial Dream

A friend once asked, “Would you ever go back to being a corporate professional?” 

My interview-ready response: “I don’t want to take it off the table. If the right opportunity and circumstances came along that were aligned to my goals.…” 

My actual answer? “I don’t want a backup plan. I want to focus 100% on being successful.” 

This may sound risky, but it’s not. Let me share one of two reasons why—one here and the other here.

Backup plans dilute your focus. 
When you’re holding onto a “Plan B,” you won’t commit fully to making your business work. 

It’s kind of like multitasking—you think you’re doing two things at once, but you’re really just task switching. We all know this slows you down and drains your energy. 

Here’s a better analogy from my 20s: dating. 

I dated a lot back then—met a ton of people. But I always kept my options open. Whenever I started dating someone, I made sure to have a backup plan… just in case it didn’t work out. Seemed smart, right? 

It was fun… until it wasn’t. 

My backup plan made me quick to bail. When inevitable challenges came up, I thought, “Why bother? I can always move on.” 

It’s like starting a movie on NetFlix with your finger poised to press the “Return” button at the first moment you get bored or annoyed.   

Looking back, I probably walked away from a few relationships that could’ve worked. (Of course, sometimes bailing is the right move!)

But here’s the problem: when you’re always halfway out, you’re never fully in. 

It’s the same with building a business. If you’re constantly reminding yourself you can always go back to a corporate job, you’re not giving your business the focus it needs to succeed. 

Blind risk vs. calculated risk. 
Now, don’t get me wrong—some risks need a backup plan. 

For example, I once considered flipping houses as a side hustle. (Thank HGTV for that.) I figured if I could learn how to fix a leaky toilet, I could flip houses. Totally reasonable, right?  🤨

But every time I thought about flipping houses, my mind would loop back to, “What’s the backup plan if this fails?” That was the tell—it wasn’t a calculated risk for me. 

Coaching, on the other hand, was different. It stretched me, but it aligned with my skills, experience, and resources. I knew—and felt—I had a higher chance of success than failure. 

How to quiet the “what if” voice. 
Friends and family will ask this question more times than you’ll want to hear it. I wrote about their good intentions before [read that here]. 

I use a proven technique to block out those doubts. It’s called goal shielding—focusing on your main goal to drown out distractions. 

History offers some dramatic (and horrible) examples of goal shielding. When Alexander the Great landed in Persia, he ordered his troops to burn their boats, leaving no option to retreat. Hermán Cortés did a similar thing during his conquest of Mexico. 

While I don’t recommend torching your safety net, the principle stands: cutting off easy exits forces you to focus on moving forward. 

I also do a quarterly review to ease any doubts that creep in. I constantly assess if my approaches are working, make course corrections, or consider backup plans. This keeps me fully committed. 

Want to dive deeper into these ideas? 

• Psychology Today has a fantastic primer on the Backup Plan Paradox [read it here].
• To learn more about goal shielding, I created this ChatGPT summary of the academic findings including references [read it here]. 

Image by Andrés Rodríguez from Pixabay