If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that launching a business is an endless series of challenges, and people  telling you “no” along the way. In the last mile to our December launch, we had to modify our SSL certificate, a prerequisite for our development team to finish up the code and final testing. It was Friday afternoon, and the customer service rep at the SSL vendor said we would basically have to wait until Monday for our order to be processed since the technical support team would be leaving soon for the weekend.  This meant that our developers would be idle all weekend, and our launch date would be further delayed.

As you probably guessed from the title of this post… we were not going to take no for an answer!

In many ways the rep’s position reminded us of other similar situations we have come across while launching this company.  We have heard:

• “NO you can’t introduce a new sizing system”
• “NO you can’t make shirts at that price range”
• “NO you can’t develop a full ecommerce site  within the time frame you have”

And many more for one reason or another. But in each case we asked a simple but powerful question:  “Why not?” and more often than not we found there was a work-around.

In the case of the SSL we simply said, “ok, we’ll go with competitor X”. The rep quickly agreed to process our order, and made sure someone from technical support followed through.