Episode 415: Thinking Time - Black Friday

Hey everyone. Well, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Hopefully you've been able to take some time off. Happy Black Friday. So I have always known of this day. Obviously I'm recording this ahead of Black Friday, but I'd always known of Black Friday as something to where it was around shopping. And I did a little bit, or at least had heard it passed around that this was when recorded in financial records years ago in accounting practices. That they would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. And so Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be in the red and stay instead of taking in the year's profits. Now, just side note for just a second, that's actually not where it came from. I didn't know that. Now, I don't want to necessarily give a history lesson on the podcast. I mean, ultimately, this is a business podcast, I'm going to share, tie this as I hopefully always do, and land this plane into something that may help you, maybe if it's just an idea, a takeaway, a mindset, etc. And so ultimately, Black Friday came from Philadelphia. So back in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, that it brought in, you know, hordes of people who arrived on Friday, and it caused a major headache for the police and who had to deal with all kinds of mischief and mayhem. And so it was such a pain, they started to refer to it as Black Friday. And so, you know, you get into these ideas of, you know, showed up in the New York Times, I think in 1975, but ultimately it was around 1981 that it began to kind of be more of an idea around Black Friday for helping retailers to go from in the red, meaning they're not profitable, to finishing the year in the black or positive for the year. And so that got me thinking about some of— some people I've had conversations with and some, some clients and even my own experience with this. So both anecdotal from my experience, but also in talking to people who have had a similar experience. See, it's interesting when you are alone and you're going through something, you don't necessarily realize that maybe other people potentially deal with this as well, or maybe they've experienced it. And that is that feeling that, oh my goodness, it's the day after Thanksgiving. Yes, there's Christmas shopping and there's other things, but oh no, we're not gonna hit our numbers. Oh no, we are, we need to finish the year strong. And oh no, I'm gonna go have to save the day for the business in order for us to hit the metrics that we need to hit. And it's interesting that that last 5 weeks or so, how many things and how many people have shared with me that, oh yeah, I have gone in at the very end of the year, busted it, closed the year out, hit the number of sales that we need to hit in whatever product line it may be, just to save the day. And so while it may not be a profitability thing, and for most of my clients, they we talk a lot more around revenue and profitability and personal income than, than, than what they had ever been accustomed to. But even in helping to go from negative of the production sales that they need to hit, hit, to ultimately flipping the script and being positive. And I also know that it comes with this frustration, it comes with a little bit of guilt, it comes with a little bit of Oh man, uh, we didn't do what I wanted us to do throughout the year, and so I have to come in and save the day. And oftentimes it ends up being this feeling of, this is the last time, this is the last time I'm going to do this. I'm going to put things in place specifically so that we don't have to do this again. And inevitably kind of end up on the hamster wheel again, having to come in and save the day. Is a business owner immune to that? Well, I think we've always had some sort of an experience, whether it's at the end of the year, maybe whether it's at Black— for probably not necessarily Black Friday specifically, but it is this kind of anxiety and push that we got to go in and finish the year strong in some way. And so what are the things that we can actually do? I think number one, one of the things I look back on is I actually never really did capture and journal my thoughts down. It all kind of remained in my head. Even whatever I'm saying about the resolve that I would carry to not experience that again and not to do that again, I never actually captured it. And I know that's so easy to say, but truthfully, writing down my thoughts to go back and say, I'm not going to experience this again. Number 2 is to also reflect on What are the things that I can commit to have my own personal integrity? And what I mean by personal integrity, I don't mean it from like lying or whatever. I mean, there is that, but I'm referring to keeping the commitments that you have to yourself. A friend of mine, Sean, uses that terminology, and I really like it, to where it's like you have personal integrity that you do what you say you're going to do. And so it's one of those things where, you know, did I this year keep my personal integrity to say, hey, I'm not— it's June, July, we're behind, I'm not going to get to end of the year when it's Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I want to be able to shut it down and be with my family and enjoy, actually enjoy the holiday season, that I don't want to be behind. I don't want to come in and have to save the day. But at the end of the day, we kind of tell ourselves a fallacy of we think that we have time, we think that we have time, and we do have time until ultimately we don't. And so I think as you're putting together your plan, and we just ran or are about to run, as a matter of fact, our annual planning workshop next week, that we're gonna— there's gonna be one thing that we're gonna do, that we're gonna make a commitment to ourselves, and we're gonna make some critical actions in business, things that we know that we can control. You can't control, as an example, somebody to buy. You really can't. You can't control somebody to buy. In anything. Yes, there's law of large numbers, sure, but we can control certain actions. And I think that if we go through the thought process to figure out what those actions are and then make the commitment to ourselves to make sure that we keep those commitments, it will help. So lastly, last week I talked about Everybody's got a plan until they got punched in the face. And I was thinking about Tyson. And the value is in the planning, not just in the plan itself, but also having something we can go back to. And this is kind of what I'm referring to, so that you don't get in this place like, I have to have a Black Friday, or I have to have a 5 weeks where we have to come in and save the day so we make our numbers yet again, whether those are financial targets or whether those are sales targets. That you want to be able to hit. And I think that that actually starts with the way that you start to preload going into next year. So if you want to join us, love to have you. It's totally free. Go to abovethebusiness.co, abovethebusiness.co. You can find the link to be able to register for the workshop. We're going to do it all in one day and you can walk out of there with arguably the best plan you've ever put together in one year. So go to abovethebusiness.com. So there you go, there's a little history lesson on where Black Friday came from. But hopefully as small business owners, we don't have to have a Black Friday for the things that we do just to be able to hit our sales numbers or to be able to hit our financial targets. All right everyone, hope you had a great Thanksgiving. And, uh, at the time of this recording, we're a little bit away, but hey, my Auburn Tigers playing Alabama. War Eagle!