Take Responsibility For Your Own Success
Yesterday, I heard a business owner exclaim, “My business will do better when the road in front of my restaurant is finished. It’s a mess!” Also, a towing business owner recently claimed that this warm winter, with less ice and snow, has resulted in much lower revenues. Similarly I’ve heard from an auto repair business that, “…business is down, this winter is not severe enough.” So many are stating their own version of “The economy is bad, no one is purchasing anything, there’s nothing I can do about it.” To which I say, these are three wonderful excuses to take a beating, earn less and complain a lot more, blaming outside uncontrollable forces. Do you really believe that a road under repair, a warm winter and the general economy is affecting–no, make that controlling–the business that one does?
Of course there is nothing you can do about the economic condition of the country–or the weather–but certainly you can create action within your own market area and operate profitably at any level of business. First of all, I suggest that the last excuse mentioned, the one I most frequently hear about the economy being bad, is the silliest of all. If you are doing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of business and are in business across the nation, then it is possible or even likely that national trends will effect your overall business. But if you are doing $1-5 million in a localized region, making national trends totally irrelevant, you make or break your own business. Take responsibility. Look around you, there are businesses doing very well. The ones mentioned above may merely look around the corner to find businesses doing well, perhaps ever their closest competitors, with lines spilling out the door, products back-ordered. How, you ask? Because they are not concerned about excuses, only action plans and good business practices that result in growing sales and profits.
Work smarter, market more effectively, be more creative, increase value, improve quality, run special promotions, make a statement, go out on a limb, be more interesting, change something, promote differently. Review your sales and marketing plan and make adjustments. Redesign your product line, meet the challenge head-on, create a cash flow pro forma and then adjust to its requirements. That’s what creates a successful business.
There are successful businesses opening and operating every day, every season, every year, some located next door to failures. If you truly believe success or failure is a function of external forces, you are doomed as external forces always happen and are typically out of your control. Since we cannot control these factors but can control our own business practices, we must direct our energies towards those things which we can control as we chart our business course to reflect necessary and appropriate changes. We need to do this daily, weekly, all the time. If you listen to your fears and believe your excuses, you are destined to be controlled by the whims of the weather.
In other words, you are in control if you have installed the appropriate key indicators and read your own financial reports often, if you track, monitor and control your businesses as you plan, train and review, if you implement an effective sales and marketing plan and install an incentive-based reward system, if you understand break-even and your profit equation. You are in control if you include within your employee program career paths, training, incentive rewards, etc. You will be doing all the right things necessary to keep revenues growing and profits increasing despite outside forces and uncontrollable events.
Whenever you are tempted to utter a complaint or excuse about why you’re not reaching your goals, stop and ask yourself if that is really the reason or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is the order.
