Bill Gallagher walks through a company that underpriced services and burned cash because the leader feared losing customers. He shows how to break fear-driven inaction: set team priorities, surface problems in quarterly planning, and use dashboards to keep everyone accountable.
Do you find yourself putting off action, maybe being indecisive and you're not sure why or what's going to get you to shift things? Have you known for a little while that there's something that you should take care of, but you just aren't in action around it? Well, I had a client recently who was dealing with this and the issue there is that they were just burning through investor cash and at the same time and the investors were willing to fund some things, but the company was underpricing their services relative to the competition. So they were burning cash they didn't need to. And of course that meant they couldn't spend it on the critical development where they really needed it. Now, the reason for this is they were afraid of how much worse things could get if they had a massive defection to the base. Right? So they were reluctant to raise the prices up to a competitive level and therefore erode the base and make the cash position even worse. Now, fear is real and you're always going to be afraid of something, you're always going to be uncomfortable. But what we notice is when we create our goals and priorities as a team and elevate the conversation so the team knows why they're doing stuff together and they hold it, we're committing to priorities at a team level and then we're keeping the visibility alive so that we as leaders have less room to do that kind of funny business of procrastinating, holding off action without making up a lot of stories about it. That's what they did in this case. Once they finally explained to the team we what was needed and why, the team, with their own fears about it, was able to support the decision and there wasn't room anymore for the leader to delay that kind of move. Now they were able to raise the rates and finally get themselves into a cash positive position. So the key here is to talk about the things that you're dealing with at a leadership team level. At a minimum, in the quarterly planning session, surface all the things with a real open and honest discussion and then commit to a few priorities that'll really move the business forward. And then to use the meeting habits, the dashboards, to keep the visibility to the priorities and the progress to the whole team so the team holds itself accountable together and really accomplishes something. We have hundreds of tools like these at our website, scalingcoach.com all available for free downloads right there. We've also got low cost options to help you get your company growing profitably no matter what the economy is. No matter what industry you're in or what part of the world you're from. So go to scalingcoach.com find all those resources there, and follow us here for more of this kind of material to help you grow your company.
