By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon Newspaper
A while back, a friend sent me a link to an old blog post called “30 things to stop doing to yourself“.
It struck me that while the list was intended for application in your personal life, the list could also be applied to your business – with a tweak or two.
Rather than talking about 30 things to stop doing, I decided to discuss a shorter list of things to start doing. Yes, lists are old school – but the things on the list require pigheaded determination to keep folks tending to them. A reminder never hurts.
Start spending time with the right kind of people. – This includes customers, mentors or other leaders of the right sort. What’s the right sort? The ones who spend their time trying to improve, grow and bring the rest of town and/or your industry with them. Don’t forget to start being the right kind of people.
Stop Hiding. Stop Playing Games. Be Transparent.
Start tackling the things that challenge your business rather than waiting on them. – Few business challenges get better over time. The rest tend to fester like an untreated wound.
Start being transparent. – Not “politician transparent”, but really, truly transparent. Faux transparency is as useful as horse biscuits – yet that’s exactly what we get from most businesses. You’ll be amazed what can happen when you simply stop pretending, stop hiding, stop manufacturing spin and stop playing games. Think you aren’t doing that now? Think about it. Consider what a frank, win-win conversation with your staff, your suppliers and your customers could produce. Opportunity, for one – which will start with the next list item. Worried about the reaction? It’ll be no worse that the reaction if everyone figures out for themselves that the business they know isn’t the real business after all.
Start putting your customers’ needs front and center. – As Zig Ziglar said, if you help enough others get what they want, you’ll get what you want. On the other hand, if someone “moves your cheese” and you whine about it – you’re probably focused on the wrong things.
Start being what you are rather than what you aren’t. – Deliver the value you love to deliver and the right customers will love *that* business. I don’t mean the well-worn or often misguided/misinterpreted “do what you love and the money will come”. I mean do what your customers love to get from you. Not sure what that is? Ask them. They know what you rock at and they know why they value it more than anyone else’s. What do they see as the work you have the most enthusiasm and insight for – particularly that which no one else brings? Yes, I know you can do the other 37 things that everyone else in your market does. Remember that “focus on customer needs” thing?
Start making mistakes. – No, I don’t mean start goofing up intentionally. Your customers need your business to stretch so you’re ready for the place they’re going. They either go with you, or without. If you aren’t messing up, you either aren’t doing anything or you aren’t doing anything interesting or new. Your best customers are the ones who will leave you behind if you’re on cruise control.
Start having higher standards. – Seek out customers, employees, products and partners who force you to improve your processes, people, products and services. If you accept what you accept now, you may as well hit the complacency cruise control – which is all too easy when things are going well. This doesn’t mean not doing anything until you can do it perfectly. It means having a constant focus on improvement, including learning from the mistakes we just talk about.
Start accepting that you aren’t ready. – Nobody is. Start anyway. They call it comfort zone, but it has another name – the place your company was before it woke up, before it doubled our sales, before it started working with better customers, before it raised its standards, before it discovered that new market, and so on. The way it used to be that you’d never go back to if you could help it.
All of these things are going to impact your culture, processes and much more. Some employees, customers, vendors and partners will not be ready for that.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
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