Don't Get Content With Your Business | Embrace Change | John Briggs, Incite Tax

Have you heard this before? I'm content where my business is at. Why should I change? Now, this comment isn't referring to a scenario which I'm totally great with. You work hard for a season, you get to like a goal point, and you're like, I'm gonna take a little breather. That's totally fine. I mean, I took a 4-week vacation one year at the end of tax season just to prove that my business, to myself, prove to myself that business was in a place That I could do that. But it was just a 4-week vacation. I came back and then we kept trying to change, and I was very content with where the business is at. I'm still content with where the business is at. But why should you change? One of the first things I would say about this is the garden box theory. I don't know who to give credit to, but I learned this from somebody else. If you think about a garden box, You have soil in it. What happens when you ignore the garden box? You come back a month later. Is it just going to be the soil the way you left it? Because nothing— I mean, you didn't do anything to it. Should be exactly how it was before, right? No, weeds have grown up. Uh, undesirables just popped up. Um, same, same concept if you think about walking on an escalator. If you stop taking a step forward, the escalator will eventually take you back down to the bottom. So this idea of, I'm content with the business, why should I change, is because if you're not putting forth an effort to keep growing the business, at least maintaining it— and my belief in maintaining is not ignoring— maintaining often requires innovation to happen because you're trying to maintain usually the financial outcome of the business, not necessarily maintain the service I'm offering. So we have this idea of the garden box and the escalator. It's because on Earth there is a natural truth that things decay without attention. It's just how it happens. Aging is a form of that. And as you see people age who didn't put attention onto health, they definitely age in a way that looks a lot less desirable than those you see that put attention to their physical well-being. I'll just drop these businesses on you too. I'm content with my business as at, why should I change? Have you ever heard of Toys R Us? I'm a Toys R Us kid. Yeah, not a million toys that you can play around with at Toys R Us Kids anymore. Why? Because they're out of business. They didn't change. They were content with their space. E-commerce came in and wiped them out. Kodak used to be the world's largest film provider. Some of you may not even heard of them. They're not in business anymore. Palm. Palm Pilots used to be the thing, you know, a handheld device to keep yourself organized. Well, most people have iPhones or Samsungs these days. Palm is almost nonexistent. Yahoo is another example. While they still exist, they do not have the market share they used to because they refused to change with the search engine. Google came in and just dominated. And then probably one that you do recognize, Blockbuster. You used to walk into these stores full of movies and things. Well, Netflix and Redbox wiped them out. They were content with where the business is at, why should they change? In fact, there is that funny story if you don't know about it where Netflix and Blockbuster, you know, they potentially looked at— Blockbuster looked at buying Netflix and like, why would we even do that? They're so small and they're not gonna be able to touch us. Well, who's laughing now, buddy? So I'm content with where my business is at, why should I change? If large corporations with massive amounts of revenue can go out of business because they didn't change, the risk is a little bit higher for small business. But now the benefit of a small business is you don't have the bureaucracy and you can pivot really quickly. So in order to be in a position where you can change, You want to make sure that you are giving yourself enough time to have that space where you can innovate and try new things out, because you obviously want to do it in a way where you're not hindering your current ability. The thing you're content with, you don't want to affect that yet. You just want to see if you can make it better or add something to the business. So if you're so busy that right now the only thing you can think about is surviving, The first thing we got to do is figure out how to free up your time. So here are 4 tips specifically. The first one, do you currently do a working lunch? How long are you taking? I know there was a point in my career where I was driving out to go somewhere every single day for lunch and the commute time plus waiting on the food, like all of that added up. I also became a big fan of Grubhub when it came out. Yeah, there's a higher fee there, but for me as a business owner, The $15 to $20 extra I paid for that meal, while it does seem steep and can get annoying, was worth the investment so that I could stay working while the food was coming to me. And then, you know, I try to be healthy. So being healthier, I bring my own lunch so that I can just eat here at the desk. So if you're not doing that, there's some time you can free up for yourself, give you some time to think about Some of these innovative things so that you're thinking about change. Consider taking a vacation from normal work. So when you're on vacation, you put an autoresponder on and you are unavailable. Clients see the autoresponder, most of them understand. Those who don't understand, you may consider not having them as clients because those people, you know, they need to change their attitude. Everyone deserves vacations. But take a vacation from your normal work, meaning put up that autoresponder saying, hey, I'm currently unavailable, so that you can have some focused time to do some of these things that can help grow your business, help you innovate, maybe take some time to put in a cash flow management system. Lots of things you can do. Third suggestion. Look at your regularly scheduled meetings. Do you need all of those? And since maybe you can figure out a way to free up time in the short run, and with the time you invest in the freed up time, you then make everything more efficient, maybe consider it for a short period of time looking at some of your regularly scheduled meetings and just saying, I'm not going to do those this week. Like in our company, we do one-on-one meetings. We want every team member to meet with their supervisor regularly. And over the years, we have found that depending on their skill set, how long they've been at the company, you know, those types of factors, some of them don't need to be met with every single week. And so that freed up some time for the supervisor. So look at the regularly scheduled meetings. It's possible maybe you can forego some of those in the short run and then use that time to invest to then make everything more efficient. So therefore your time is freed up in the long run as well. And then if you are in a service-based company, limiting your client meetings just for the next 4 weeks, just maybe have maybe a couple slots open each week as opposed to just a completely open calendar. And then again, it only works if you use the freed up time to do the things you need to do. So in the context of this video, we're talking about not being content with change. So maybe focusing on what are some things you can improve. From a long-term standpoint, I would suggest also using the time you free up to figure out how to make things more efficient overall. Again, the comment was, I'm content with my business. Why should I change? Ultimately, you should change because the world changes, and if you don't change with it, you will go out of business. It has happened before, and none of us are immune to that possible outcome. So you always want to have time where you're at least thinking, are there new things I need to do now based on where the market is going? Remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.