Trust Your Gut - Bishop T.D Jakes

You know what you know.

One of the hardest pieces of advice to wrap your head around as an entrepreneur is the time-tested notion of “trusting your gut”. It was a nugget of wisdom I was given time and time again by veteran business owners and founders. But what exactly did that mean? Fortunately, hindsight is 20/20 and it is much easier to describe this leadership lesson through experiences we’ve lived through as a business.

When we first started Practice Makes Perfect as a 501(c)3 in 2010, our team was trying to run academic summer programs for as many children as possible. That meant operating a bottom-of-the-pyramid-like solution by spending as little money as possible and serving as many people as possible. After our first summer, we realized education is not the space where we should be cutting corners or skimping on quality. As a result, we’d have to find a way to raise more money faster or get schools to contribute to the cost of delivering on our services.

Our team of two people at the time believed we were providing services that were valuable enough to warrant a school investment. As a result, we went from giving schools a free program to charging them $400 per child. Every single one of our partners that had received our programs left. For months, schools told us they had no money. At times, it felt hopeless. We wanted to serve children, but couldn’t rationalize why schools weren’t willing to allocate their resources to support the work we were carrying out.

Nonetheless, my gut said there were schools out there that valued our services. Sure enough, after months of outreach and countless meetings, we secured four school partnerships in NYC and one in DC that contributed to the costs of the program. Following another successful summer and lots of constructive comments, we iterated on our model. The changes pushed us to go from $400 per child to $1,600 per child.

As you can imagine, our team had nearly tripled and here we were hitting the pavement again believing schools would pay four times more money the following year. After hundreds of rejections and half of our former partners choosing not to renew their partnerships, we finally managed to secure three new partnerships. Despite people on my team losing faith and arguing that we needed to find another source of revenue to supplement the cost of the program, we had a gut feeling schools could support the cost if they valued the services.


By persisting in those times when our gut told us to, we built the revenue model that has continued to fuel our growth. There is an element of luck in entrepreneurship and the advice on trusting your gut comes the closest to rubbing against that luck. Truthfully, there have been times when companies have persisted too long when they should have made a pivot. The reality is that the answers are not clear or black and white and so you don’t have a better option than to just trust your gut.