When my first daughter was born, I stopped exercising regularly. I remember the day I canceled my gym membership well because I told myself, “I’ll join up again once everything settles back to normal.”
That was 9 years ago, and as I’m sure you can guess, normal didn’t come that quickly. In fact, I often look back at those days and wish I could have that much peace and quiet again, even though it felt like I was running in overdrive then.
A year ago I joined a gym again, and wish I’d made myself find the time in those early days because the extra energy it gives me has helped in every area of life.
I feel like I was cheating myself and my daughters by allowing myself to get out of shape during that time, with the excuse that I was “too busy” to make the time to invest in my health and fitness.
I was talking about this with one of my longest-term clients the other day, who is the owner of a mid-market manufacturing company.
He told me, “You know, I almost made the same mistake on the business side. When you first gave me your proposal, I immediately thought of half a dozen excuses for me to avoid it. It was expensive. I had other things on my plate. It would require me to invest time and make some uncomfortable changes. And if I’d listened to those excuses, my personal net worth and business value would be a heck of a lot lower today!
Typically, by the time I talk to senior management in a company, they’ve recognized that there is a lot of room to improve their sales, marketing, and customer experience efforts.
Let’s consider an example of a recent client I worked with to solidify the example:
The division I worked with was doing $30M/year in sales.
We introduced changes to their sales culture, sales management, processes, and tools that re-energized the sales team, gave management the insight they needed to help the team close more high-impact deals, and created a 15% improvement in sales (after years of flat sales).
That averages out to an extra $375,000 in sales per month, that they would have lost out on had they not accepted & completed the project.
Think about that – a delay of even 3 months would have cost them $1,125,000 in lost revenue.
That’s a big premium to pay for indecision. In fact, for many of the clients I work with, the cost of delaying a decision to work with me for a month is more than my total fee.
The need for those things doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get “back to normal.” The world only gets more hectic, and what is a competitive advantage today, is the industry standard tomorrow.
Putting off making those changes is easy, and easy to justify.
Change is expensive.
It’s time-consuming.
But it’s also necessary.
Back to the gym. Before I started my regular routine, I was wiped out at the end of the day. I had less energy and consequently less patience. I was often ready for sleep before my daughter's bedtimes.
Now, I visit the gym, every day unless I’m on the road from 9-10AM and I’m in the best shape of my life. More importantly, I have all the energy in the world to be a huge part of my daughter's lives. Investing that hour per day gives me back at least 2 useable hours a day that I didn’t have before.
It would have been easy to continue to put this off, but the value of taking the plunge when I needed to has been exponential.
How much are delays and indecision costing you?
Your Challenge For This Week:
Let’s get specific here. Give yourself 2 minutes to answer these questions as honestly as you can.
How confident am I that my sales team is following an effective process with 100% of their leads?
How confident am I that none of our existing clients are feeling like they’ve “slipped through the cracks?”
How confident am I that my sales and marketing teams are working together smoothly, rather than getting in each other's way?
How confident am I that my people are doing the highest impact activities possible every day?
How confident am I that my managers and front line people can effectively coach and mentor others to improve performance?
If you think that any of those areas can be improved, then why haven’t you made a decision to fix them yet?
You already know you’ll need external help (otherwise it would have been taken care of already).
So – what’s stopping you?
Best,
Noah
