In motorcycle education, there's a phrase they drill into you before you ever touch a public road:
When in doubt, ride it out.
It sounds reckless. It's the opposite. It's the most important survival skill a rider can learn. Because on a motorcycle, the thing that kills you isn't the corner. It's what you do when the corner scares you.
Here's what happens. You're leaned into a turn. It tightens. You didn't expect it. Every instinct screams the same thing: get off the gas. Brake. Slow down. Fix this.
So you chop the throttle.
And that's when you crash.
When you abruptly cut power mid-corner, the front forks compress, the rear wheel unloads, the chassis geometry shifts, and the bike destabilizes at the exact moment you need it most. The physics are unforgiving. The bike can handle more lean angle than you think. The tires have more grip than you think. But only if you keep the system loaded and moving.
The trained response is trail braking — a deliberate, controlled reduction of speed where you're managing the front brake and keeping light throttle to the rear wheel simultaneously. You're slowing your commitment to the current line without shocking the system. The front stays loaded for steering precision. The rear stays planted. Engine RPMs maintain gyroscopic stability. Everything stays composed.
It's not about going fast. It's about staying in control by staying in motion.
I keep thinking about this because I've watched the same crash happen in boardrooms.
A company senses a pivot is needed. The product isn't landing. The market shifted. The thesis is wobbly. Fear sets in. And the first instinct is always the same: stop selling. Pause pipeline. Pull back outreach. "Let's figure out the product first."
They chop the throttle.
It feels responsible. It feels like the prudent thing. Why would you keep selling something you're not sure about? Why risk the brand?
But what actually happens is this: pipeline goes cold. Revenue becomes unpredictable. Sales reps start updating their resumes. The market intelligence that comes from live customer conversations — the objections, the win/loss patterns, the signal about what people actually want — goes dark. And now you're trying to make a strategic turn with no stability underneath you.
You've introduced the very risks you were trying to avoid. Cash flow pressure. Extended time to market. A six-to-twelve month pipeline rebuild tax that nobody budgeted for. And worst of all, you're making product decisions in a vacuum — no real-time feedback, no signal, just internal assumptions about what the market wants.
You've crashed. You just don't know it yet.
I learned this from two leaders early in my career.
Don Lavoie was my mentor at LowerMyBills.com — we took it from $7 million to over $250 million and a $400 million exit. He used to say that sales drove the company's culture and morale. If the company sees that sales has given up, they all give up. But when sales is motivated, the energy radiates through the entire organization. Sales wasn't a department at LowerMyBills. It was the pulse.
Years later, I watched Don Robert — CEO of Experian, a FTSE 100 company operating in 44 countries — get up on a stage in London in front of 700 salespeople from across EMEA and tell us we were the lifeblood of the company. And he meant it. This was a guy who started his career managing car loans in Portland. He never forgot where the energy came from.
Neither of those guys would ever take their hand off the throttle.
They understood something that I've seen confirmed over and over in twenty-five years of scaling companies: pipeline isn't just a revenue function. It's three things at once.
It's revenue. Obviously. Cash flow is the rear tire grip keeping you connected to the road. When it goes away, everything else becomes theoretical. You can have the most brilliant product vision in the world, but if you've starved the business of oxygen during the pivot, you never get to execute it.
It's intelligence. Every sales conversation is a free focus group. Objections are product feedback. Competitive mentions tell you who's moving. Close rates tell you if your new story resonates. If you shut down pipeline activity, you've removed your ability to see through the corner. You're flying blind.
It's stability. A team in motion has purpose. A team told to wait is halfway out the door. Rebuilding that — recruiting, ramping, refilling from zero — takes months. The trailing cost of stopping is always worse than it looks in the moment.
When a rider trail brakes into a corner, they're doing all three simultaneously. Managing speed. Gathering information about the road surface and radius. Keeping the machine composed. The founder who keeps pipeline alive during a pivot is doing the same thing.
I've also seen the crash from the other side of the track.
I've seen companies deliberately pause sales and pipeline development because leadership wanted to get the perfect product to market first. The logic always feels airtight. Why sell something that isn't ready? Why risk the brand on something we might change?
The product is never perfect. It never is. But while they wait for perfection, churning customers aren't replaced. Revenues decline, creating new financial pressures that make the pivot harder, not easier. And when leadership finally decides they need to start selling again, it's too late for quick fixes. Six months to rebuild a pipeline. Twelve months before revenues become predictable again.
And here's the part that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet: there are no new sales wins to celebrate. All they have are losses to hang onto. Winning creates wins — new logos create energy, momentum, proof that the story resonates. But they've turned off the mechanism that creates enthusiasm in the business. They're left with losses and hope.
That is not a culture anyone wants to work in.
The brand risk fear is real but almost always overstated. Executives imagine prospects will be angry if the product isn't perfect. Most buyers in early or growth-stage markets expect iteration. What actually damages brand is disappearing from the market and then reappearing six months later asking people to care again.
Continuity of presence matters more than perfection of message.
And here's the part that really bites: pipeline has compounding rebuild costs. You don't pause for three months and lose three months. You pause for three months and lose six to nine. Relationships went cold. Champions changed roles. Budgets got allocated elsewhere. The clock doesn't pause with you.
Motorcycle instructors know something that business schools don't teach: indecision is the most dangerous state. A committed action in a slightly wrong direction is almost always recoverable. A frozen rider in the middle of a corner is not.
"When in doubt" is doing a lot of work in that phrase. It doesn't mean when you have no idea what's happening. It assumes you have training. Fundamentals. Some feel for the situation. You've done the homework. You're just not sure.
And the advice is: trust your preparation and act.
That's not recklessness. That's a trained operator choosing forward momentum over paralysis.
Push. Lean. Pray.
The corner doesn't wait for you to feel ready.