I love mixed martial arts. If I could do anything other than what I am doing today in the collision repair industry, it would be in the MMA world. I titled this column, Fighting to succeed through failure because I feel like the last three years of my life has been a season of challenges. That does not mean there has not been any success during the three years. Someone has said there are seasons of life, and I think that is correct. I believe we can have those seasons professionally as well. During the last three years, I am grateful for the successes, but there have also been wrapped up in those years some significant challenges that could have led to failure. Let me explain a bit further.
The challenges I am referring to, began in 2016. It was October 2016, when we took the next step of growth for our business. We closed on a purchase of a twenty-six thousand square foot former Staples Office supply center. Before closing, we had our contractor hired and ready to move quickly on renovations to be opened in March 2017. March came and went with very little progress on improvements. The story we kept hearing from our contractor was that the City was delaying the permit process. After continued delays, we terminated our relationship with this contractor and started over. We received our Occupancy license in November 2017, one full year after closing. During this same time frame, we parted ways with our most significant source of revenue. Therefore, the location that had been in operation since 2001, revenue dropped by almost fifty percent. I won't use this column to get into the details of that separation, other than to say, doing the right thing can sometimes be painful for a season.
I've had a few people question my transparency for this column. Announcing to the world some of your biggest setbacks are not necessarily top on the list of things I wanted to accomplish in life. However, if I can share some of insights on what I have learned to help other people avoid them, it is worth it.
Hindsight is always 20/20, looking back I realized we had become complacent in our business.
Complacency
We opened our first location in 2001, quickly grew to a second location in 2004 and through the success, became complacent. Craig Groeschel says, "The biggest threat to future success is current success," and I have lived that story. We did very little marketing our business; work showed up at our door every day. We had created systems and processes to make our business efficient and align with our values and very rarely kept working on them. We just assumed what we did yesterday would work for today.
Just like everything else in life, if we are not growing, we will get left behind. We had the mindset we were the best, so there was not an urgency to grow and become better. The opposite of complacency is urgency. We needed to get a sense of urgency in our business throughout our team. As with everything, the urgency must start with the leader and then infiltrate to each person. Hindsight, we should have managed our original contractor with more urgency; we should have marketed our business with more urgency; we should have been more intentional with growing and improving our processes; we should have actively assisted our team members to grow.
You, like us, have to make the decision, do you want to put in mediocre effort, and be average, get left behind in this fast-paced ever-changing world, or do you want to have a sense of urgency, be intentional and not become complacent whether in current success or failure.
Here are a few things I have learned to avoid complacency.
Keys to avoid complacency
- Consistently do what others only do occasionally. One of our words for 2020 is Consistency. This Word came from one of our Production Managers, as we were each selecting our Word for 2020. Determine what actions, done consistently, will make the most significant impact in your world, and commit to them.
- Be alert. Alert is another one of our Words for 2020. There are a multitude of things we can miss in business and life if we are not alert to what is going on in and outside of our four walls. We must stay alert to discern what is best. We need to realize that there are things outside of our business that can harm us on the inside. I'm not saying we should live in fear or focus on the negative; I am saying we need to be alert, put our mind in gear and be aware of ways we must be quick to act if we want to dominate in our business.
- Excel in everything you do. Keeping with our theme, this is another one of our leader's Word for 2020. Excel in all aspects of your business - strive for excellence in every detail, small to large. Many people only focus on the big things, but it is the little things, done consistently with excellence, that have the most significant impact.
Too many eggs in one basket
The other factor that played a part in our season of decline is we had too many eggs in one basket. It is something we were aware of and had conversations about but never did anything to change it until the impact of the change hurt significantly. I'm assuming we are not the only collision repair organization that has or had a large percentage of our work coming from one referral source. Looking back, the things we have done over the last three years, we should have been doing consistently over time. I have a column entitled Ways to diversify your referral sources; therefore, I will not spend much time on that subject here. If you do find yourself in this position, my advice is to take action now, not tomorrow, to diversify your referral base, to take care of your current and past customers, and look for ways to serve in your community. When we sincerely serve our community, the referrals will follow.
