Category: Growth Series

This weekend I read a 1978 Harvard Business Review article on strategy for service firms, “Strategy is Different in Service Businesses.” (Thomas)

It was an interesting read for a variety of reasons, but one of the lines that stuck out to me was, “Every company depends on an ability to renew its franchise in the marketplace.”

When I think back over my career, I remember many businesses that were the darlings of our conversations and that either no longer exist or have faded into shadows of their former selves.

That this is the natural state of the market fills me with both wariness and inspiration.

Wariness, because I have to be vigilant about creating new value to maintain our existing business. Inspiration, because there’s another opportunity emerging to build something great.

I’m a “big” with Big Brothers Big Sisters. The kid that I spend time with is similar to me in many ways:

– He likes board and video games
– He likes to cook
– He enjoys adventures

But, he’s also very different from me in other ways. I workout most days, meditate twice a day, and relentlessly pursue personal growth. My “little” is instead very comfort oriented: he wants to eat rich food, watch TV, and sit by the fire. I doubt he’ll ever embrace challenge or regimen like I have.

And that’s okay- he’s not me. I have no interest in mentoring him onto my path. Instead, I see my role as creating opportunities for him to discover his own path.

I’m back in not-so-sunny Portland after a month in Baja. Right before I left, I wrote this post on environmental change being a catalyst for new growth:

This morning, I woke and sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, and feeling grateful for all the shifts in thinking that happened while I was experiencing the desert vistas.

One of those shifts was to re-think my goals. Last fall, I wrote about how the goals we pursue affect our experience and our outcomes, often in ways we don’t understand when we set the goal:

In behavioral psychology, there’s a phenomenon known as “goal contagion,” where others’ goals become our own, simply through our interactions. Your friend gets excited about Tae Bo, and the next thing you know, you’re hooking and jabbing in your living room to an old Billy Blanks VHS tape.

One of the goals that entrepreneurs get infected with is growth. It’s rare to encounter an entrepreneur that isn’t trying to figure out how to grow to “the next level.” Two years ago, when I visited Baja the first time, I decided to anchor my thinking around this challenge because it was so prevalent.

But as I enjoyed my morning coffees this past month, watching sunrises over the Sea of Cortez, I wondered if it’s not actually a good goal to pursue? With the benefit of two years of thinking about it, I wondered if pursuing growth can inhibit growth?

What if your criteria for what objectives you would take on was that they were easy?

In the book Scaling Up, author Verne Harnish, uses a graphic to challenge the traditional mentality of entrepreneurship. He replaces the model of summiting a mountain with a river that flows downhill. His point is that nature chooses the easiest route and businesses should too.

Easy is an interesting criteria to play with because so many things in business are hard.

One of the consequences of using easy as a filter is that it curtails over-investment. If something doesn’t easily work, then it’s abandoned. More initiatives die because they ask too much, but the ones that remain are profitable.

Additionally, easy as a criteria engenders thinking because thinking is easier than doing. Thinking is often helpful in business because it anticipates problems and identifies opportunities. Both of which are missed when you’re heavily involved in doing.

Whether easy as a decision filter is right for you, it’s important to understand that we all have internal priorities that shape our decisions. Yet, we tend to be unaware of them.

Consciously choosing how you’ll make decisions, even for just a season, can help expose your inherent priorities and their impact on you and your business.

One of the inherent challenges of entrepreneurship is that some initiatives you launch will require time to have an effect.

For example, I spoke with an agency owner last year who was developing leads through LinkedIn. He said that he posted for almost a year before he started to see any business from that channel.

What makes time a challenge is that often the initiative you launch leads to a dead end. There are many marketing channels that the agency owner I talked to could have invested in that would not have had any impact after a year.

And it’s even trickier to navigate because it’s easy to slip into sunk cost fallacy where you assess whether to keep investing in an initiative based upon how much you’ve already put into it.

It’s a gamble. Knowing it’s a gamble is helpful, because gamblers have rules to manage risk. They decide in advance when it’s time to get up from the table and cash in their chips.

For anything significant you’re starting, it’s helpful to set some boundaries. Answer questions like:

• How much will you invest and for how long?
• What signs do you need to see to merit further investment?
• When will you move on? 

Just understanding that you’re stepping into the casino will help you to better navigate the data you collect as your investment resolves.