There’s a refrain I hear somewhat often from a certain type of manager. It goes something like this: “Well, my management strategy is that I don’t let my employees come to me with problems. Instead, I tell them to come to me with solutions. I shouldn’t be the central problem solver — they should!”
And sure, there is something to that strategy. I’ve long been a proponent of empowering your team to deal with a wide range of customer-driven and internal issues. But I take umbrage with the idea that a leader’s central duty is not to solve problems.
I’ll take it one step further — life is a series of problems needing to be solved. Even if you’re independently wealthy with no demands placed upon you, you still need to solve the problem of how to fill your days. Problems are a core part of the human experience, and if we lived in a world without them, then there simply wouldn’t be a need for leadership.
At the core, leaders are hired to solve problems. That said, they’re not hired to solve every problem. Smart leaders pick their battles and don’t get mired in the minutiae. But as I’m currently working with some franchise businesses, I’m seeing how easy it is to overcorrect from the above attitude and end up as the problem solver in chief.
As an owner-operator, you can easily fall into the trap of solving all the problems because you’re the one with all the answers. And if you lean into that impulse to just solve things yourself, you run the risk of creating a team that isn’t empowered to solve anything on its own.
The moral of this story is that the best leaders find a way to achieve balance. You shouldn’t be seeking out a problem-free life, letting your employees handle things while you sip daiquiris on the beach. At the same time, you can’t become a multi-purpose tool solving every last problem in your operation. True, visionary leadership means prioritizing impactful problems and leveraging your position and skills to resolve them.
As I work with these smaller enterprises, it’s easy to see who understands this distinction and who doesn’t. Those that get it empower their teams to solve small, everyday problems, coaching and guiding them toward this crucial skill development. The people who struggle with this concept feed their team easy answers, to the long-term detriment of all parties involved.
When this concept is implemented successfully, I see a culture of problem solvers spread throughout the operation. If you’re still not sure what kind of problems are worth a manager’s time to address personally, think of macro items like increasing reach to customers, evaluating products and comparing them to competitors, etc.
The challenge is not falling into the camp of never problem solving or being the go-to solution for everything. Both approaches are myopic in their own ways, and your business will suffer for it. What you need is an ecosystem built around teaching and coaching on how to solve problems, allowing you to redirect the most powerful problem-solving mind in the room (yours) into building your business.
In business, you’ll often have one or many partners. These can take a lot of different forms, including formal partnerships, employer-employee relationships, large work groups of your peers, or even the c-suite. But even if you’re Bob Iger, I can assure you that you partner with other individuals with whom you have a regular working relationship.
Early on in my career I found myself with a peer who made an excellent partner. There were four of us in this role, but he and I had the same manner of thinking. We ran similar divisions and were highly compatible, and he ended up being one of the best business partners I ever had. While we had different skillsets, there was a lot of mutual respect, and we each found ways to use our differences to grow.
Most successful business relationships work this way. But things don’t always go so smoothly. In the blogosphere, you’ll often hear a lot of discussion about how you can get into a personal relationship with someone only to realize that they were the wrong choice. Sometimes it can be difficult to escape these situations.
Business relationships can also have that aspect. I’d challenge you to consider whether you might have a toxic business partner in your life. I don’t mean somebody who reports to you; I mean a peer who is consistently doing the wrong things, bringing negative energy, or coaching you in a way that isn’t helping to build you up and bring out your best work.
I recently realized that my toxic business partner is the clock. I write about time a lot, and it recently occurred to me that a lot of that interest is rooted in my own toxic relationship with it. What I’ve learned is that if I allow this business partner to talk to me about going faster or being more efficient or lambast me for not getting enough done, it will only create an anxiety spiral and lead to sub-optimal decision making.
I’m not the only one who notices this. People I work with often notice when I’m pushing especially hard on something, and it’s almost always because my toxic business partner is in my ear. And the look I usually get in response is one that says, “Why are we making this a big deal right now?”
I’ve learned to be sensitive to that kind of response. It lets me know that I may be listening to the wrong voice right now and may need to rethink my motivation and consider listening to another voice instead.
Perhaps this particular example is an unconventional business partnership, but the core truth is still there. If your partner isn’t adding to you or their influence is reductive, then to be the best version of yourself, you may need to redefine or terminate your relationship with that individual.
Since I haven’t discovered the means to transcend time (yet), so I can’t end my relationship with the clock. But I can redefine our relationship and be more selective in when and if I choose to listen to that voice. I read and workshop a lot of ideas — some work, and some don’t. But I’ve grown enough to realize that if I can’t quell my toxic partner’s voice, then I’m not going to make the best decisions that I can.
So what’s your challenge, and how are you going to make sure that a toxic business partner isn’t holding you back from reaching your potential?
If you’ve followed this blog for a while (and if you don’t, you should — my mother likes when I’m validated by followers), you know that I often warn people against following the Tyranny of the Urgent in allocating their time. Best practice practice is to let clear priorities and goals be your north star, with no urgently waving flag distracting you from the big picture.
Today, though, I want to talk about urgency in a new way. The Tyranny of the Urgent centers around small things that don’t matter or problems that burn hot but leave very little lasting impact. Now, retain that thought, but put it aside for now.
Years ago, when updating my résumé, there was an early draft that I did myself. In place of the two to four sentences where you write about who you are and why you’re God’s gift to Creation, I just put four words: I Get Things Done. (Since having learned about the value of professional résumé writers, I have burned this version and listen to their wise counsel.)
Why did this statement feel right? I work with a lot of people in coaching and management positions who understand what needs to happen to make their business better or move on to the next level. But that’s just it — they can identify what they need to do, but getting it done is another thing entirely.
The biggest hurdle to accomplishing these tasks is that they’re difficult or require too much of a time investment. They require a lot of thought and planning, but the truth is that the big things don’t come easily. And if you don’t have the sense of urgency to get these things done, then they just won’t happen.
People often feel great when they walk out of a planning session with three clearly identified goals in hand. There is a feeling of clarity of purpose, like you’re finally on the right track. But I can tell you from experience, knowing what you need to do and doing it are two entirely different things.
I had a peer who was running a division, and he was excellent at his job. But he had a soft touch, and unfortunately there was someone on his team, let’s call him Joe, who just couldn’t perform. Joe was in a critical sales role and had undergone extensive coaching, but he just wasn’t able to put the pieces together. Ultimately, he’d been given a very fair shot, but it just didn’t make sense to keep him around.
My peer had already taken great pains to try and make Joe work, but even when it was clear what needed to be done, he couldn’t bring himself to fire him. Without a sense of urgency, all he saw was that he had a difficult task in front of him that he didn’t want to do. And so he didn’t.
That situation dragged on, even though my peer knew what the right thing to do was. Because it wasn’t urgent. Until one day, our mutual boss, the company president, had had enough with underperformance in the division. He called my peer and told him that he needed to fire Joe. To which my peer continued to prevaricate and say that, well, he’d been working on things with Joe, but he just needed the right time with all these things going on right now.
So our boss decided to make things urgent. He said, “You need to fire Joe. Now. Put down the phone — don’t hang up. Go fire Joe, and then come back to the phone and tell me that you did it.” My peer returned and confirmed that he had, finally, blessedly, let Joe go. To which our boss responded, “Good. Because if you couldn’t pull that off, I would have had to fire you for damaging the business by not doing what you knew needed done.”
The lesson here is to embrace urgency for the things that really matter. Don’t get sidetracked by fleeting impulses, but it’s just as big a mistake to fail to address the fire burning in your organization. Address the thing that will transform your business, not just the loudest noise in the room. Identifying the difference between urgent issues that matter and background problems is the central responsibility of any true business leader.
Many years ago, I found myself in the position of running about a dozen units fulfilling similar roles. Most of them did well, but two of them were struggling and needed restructuring. So we sat down and made the hard decisions that involved reducing staff and reorienting the local organization. The changes we made weren’t exactly the same across the board, but they were quite similar and had the same broad strokes.
Of course, nobody involved was excited about this process. But the numbers were clear and so was the solution, even if we didn’t like it. My job throughout this was to help create the plan, and it was on the local team to implement those ideas successfully.
I visited all of my divisions, but when I got to these two units in particular I noticed very different energies. Both of them had seen a small tick down as the changes settled in, which was to be expected. But where one started to crystalize and regain performance in both sales and profitability, the other was just continuing to limp along.
I visited the recovering unit, and I was struck by their strong executive who had accepted the painful cuts and decided to move forward. His attitude was clearly one of, “Here’s what we need to get done, this is what we can do, now let’s focus on what we can achieve.” With his hands-on leadership, their numbers continued to trend upwards for another 2-3 years, and that unit was a glowing success stories about resurgence after making difficult decisions.
The other unit did not have that same kind of leadership. Over the next year, they never recovered even to their prior performance. And I noticed when I visited that there was this somber air of sadness hanging over the office. Desks were still filled with former employees’ equipment, workspaces were never reorganized to account for the new size and makeup of the team, and people would lament about employees who had gone and comment that they missed “the good ol’ days.”
That unit was covered in a palpable malaise. There was a begrudging acceptance that they’d been in a bad place and had to make changes, but nobody wanted to move on. Leadership allowed them to wallow in that feeling and ossify. Nothing changed because they were doing the same old work with fewer resources, and local leadership implemented no changes that would have made them more agile or efficient. The executive had accepted the cuts as necessary, but he never looked for a path forward.
I believe that the tale of these two companies hinges on their respective executives. The first unit’s exec acknowledged the hard thing, did it, and then moved on to help his unit thrive and grow in a new direction.
The second executive struggled to make peace with the hard decision and never moved forward. That team was so reticent to accept the difficult thing and the change that follows that a year later they had to be further restructured, which proved to be the only way to fix their downward spiral.
In retrospect, I realize that my own error in this tale is that I didn’t realize the second executive was unwilling to embrace the future and didn’t resolve that problem myself. Had I done that, perhaps these two units could have had similar positive endings instead of one of them performing so poorly that further cuts were necessary.
As you take stock at the beginning of this year, are you where you want to be? Is your company performing well, or do you see difficult changes on the horizon? Now is a good time to look ahead and prepare, rather than being caught unawares at a critical point. There are two paths forward: one is begrudging, and the other is understanding and effective. Which are you going to choose?
It’s easy to predict the themes of most columns this time of year — start setting your goals for 2026, take a look back at how you accomplished your goals in 2025, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these topics, and they’re classics for a reason; strong, visionary leaders are supposed to check their vision and chart the path ahead.
Here’s the thing, though. We’ve all heard this advice more times than we can remember, and I’d be willing to wager that 90% of people reading this either don’t remember or haven’t recently checked what their goals were for 2025 around this time last December.
I include myself in this figure, and I think it’s clear why we all talk a big game at the end of the year and then quickly forget our plans by March. Goals are large, abstract plans, and they’re of the kind that is especially unlikely to survive contact with reality. Even the premise is a little absurd — markets rise and fall regardless of the earth’s relative position to the Sun, yet we insist on planning operations based on the artificial timeline of a solar year.
If you don’t believe me, I’d encourage you to dust off your plans from last year and see how closely they meet the needs of your operation today. I suspect you’ll find one of two things. If you’re like me, you’re iterating so far in advance that you won’t even be able to find a starting point. But if you do find them, I’d imagine you haven’t hit them all these 12 months later, although I’d certainly love to hear that someone has completed their yearly list of goals and that it had a positive impact.
Instead of focusing on the annual aspect, I keep a list of things that I want to accomplish and update it year-round. But listening to a podcast recently, they talked about an aphorism often misattributed to Confucius that says something to the effect of: A man who chases two rabbits catches neither.
Reflecting on that, it was impossible not to notice that I’m always chasing more than a few rabbits, myself. In a recent column I talked about the importance of knowing which lever(s) to pull. Today, I’m advising finding a few quiet moments amidst the fray of new years initiatives and really thinking through if there’s one rabbit that would make a particularly good stew for you.
Of course, finding the right rabbit to chase is not always the simplest thing. I was recently working on a SWOC analysis with my team, and while I’m jaded and tired of these analyses, they really are useful tools for telling you the thing that you should already know. In this case, they’re excellent for helping you identify which goal is worthy of your focus.
If you’re struggling to identify which rabbit to chase, try a SWOC analysis — a quick one, not the kind that requires a hotel in a different city. It can be extremely useful to get input from stakeholders on what they see as opportunities and threats, and maybe that perspective will be what stops you from running after two or three or ten rabbits and helps you focus in on the one worth chasing.
Once you have a goal in mind, you have to keep it present in your focus. Otherwise, you’re going to end up getting sidetracked by another rabbit and lose sight of the one you’ve been pursuing. I recommend writing down your goal and looking at it at least once a month to make sure it’s remaining top of mind in your day to day operations.
Whether you’re in a dark room by yourself or at the whiteboard with your team, use your time and focus to give yourself the opportunity to bring home that rabbit and enjoy a tasty stew at the end of next year.
In business, so often it’s about knowing which levels to pull, when. You’re probably familiar with the allegory of a shipping magnate whose freighter is loaded with cargo ready for transport, but something is stuck and the shaft on the propeller won’t turn.
The shipping magnate’s crew looks the ship over and everything looks normal. Vexed, the magnate calls in an expert. This expert looks at the whole system — goes over the boiler, listens to the engine, generally pokes at everything for an hour and a half. They then pull out a giant mallet, walk to the drive shaft, hit it real hard one time, and tells the magnate to try and start the propeller now.
Miraculously, the problem is fixed. The expert tells the magnate, “Great, that’ll be $20,000.” The magnate is baffled and asks why it costs so much to swing a mallet one time. To which the expert clarifies that the magnate isn’t paying for the swing of the mallet, but for the expertise of knowing where to swing.
The moral of the story is that there’s a lot of value in knowing when and where to apply your efforts. Which leads me to today’s topic: knowing which levers to pull.
When running a business, whether a small local operation or a global enterprise, there are things you’d like to be different. There are probably several things, actually: you want to update your sales process, sell more of a certain product, etc. I ran into this issue when going on site visits with a management team. I’d look everything over and come away with 27 changes that would improve operations.
But in our allegory, the expert didn’t swing the mallet 27 times. They swung it once. If you have a lot of things that you want to change, then you have a responsibility to pull the right levers and make those changes. At the same time, the worst thing you could do is start pulling all 27 levers at once.
Because when you make a change, you need to see what happens after. Even if you’re 100% certain that a lever needs to be moved, maybe it only needs to be pulled halfway, or maybe you’ve overlooked a confounding variable that changes which lever needs pulling entirely. And if you only realize your mistake after you’ve pulled a bunch of levers, you’ll have no clues on how to course correct.
So think it through. Talk things over with your team, and when you’re ready, pull one lever, then sit back and watch to see how (and if) it moves the needle. I can tell you from experience that after thinking everything over, it’s going to feel like you’ve already been waiting for weeks or months by the time you actually pull the lever. But you need to give the change time to breathe and have its full effect on your operations.
But that doesn’t mean you need to sit on your hands while you’re waiting to see what changes, though. Instead, go back to your list of 27 items and look it over. Of all those items, I’d bet that some affect different areas; maybe some are pertinent to sales, whereas others pertain to operational efficiency or product development. If you can isolate the impacts of pulling different levers and establish separate controls, you can enact multiple changes and record them separately without worrying about them overlapping and messing with your results.
The only danger to this method is if there is unforeseen overlap between the two levers you pull. For example, if you change sales compensation, that will affect product movement, sales behavior, efficiency, etc. So if you changed something about a product at the same time you changed sales compensation and suddenly you’re selling more or less, it could very well have nothing to do with your product change, and you’re going to end up with some misleading results when analyzing your changes.
For this reason, having a well thought out plan is essential. Once you’ve accounted for all the variables you can and are confident that you’ll get good, isolated data, pull the lever. Then sit back, record what you see, and have the discipline to follow through and not change anything else until your first change has run its course.
Pro tip: If you can A/B test, do it. This will greatly speed up how quickly you can acquire real, actionable data about potential changes. If you work in retail, right now is a great time to try three similar-but-different concepts on three similar-but-different markets and see how the changes stack up side by side.
As a leader, it’s your job to know which levers to pull and when. While you should be cautious and methodical in your approach, you eventually need to make a decision and enact these changes. Because the only thing worse than pulling too many levers is pulling none at all.
You’re probably at least passingly familiar with the hit Blink 182 song, All the Small Things. It’s catchy, has a good beat, and I think we’ve all heard it countless times in the 26 years since its release. This song about the importance of small gestures recently came to my mind during a coaching session.
I was working with a group of business owners and coaching them through the process of organizing and preparing their business plans so that they’d be ready to go to market in the coming months.
At the end of one session, a participant who had done a lot of note taking pointed out that, “It’s all the small things. All the small things you don’t think about or know need done are what end up killing you.” It was an accurate observation, although this session in particular had a different dichotomy than big vs. small issues.
Instead, we were focusing on one-off tasks vs. continuing needs. Setting up licenses, organizing business plans, and ensuring product readiness were some of the one-off items we discussed. For continual development, we looked at things like training plans for future employees and instituting policy structures and marketing.
The ongoing tasks weren’t much of a revelation for this group, but the one-off items prompted a lot of discussion about where and how to allocate one’s time. This leads me to my main thesis here: Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or an owner, your most valuable asset is your time and the personal knowledge and experience that you bring to the table.
In the past I’ve recommended hiring to your weakest suit. Evolving this coaching lesson, I had everyone work on dividing these tasks not by one-off vs. continual, but by what they could easily accomplish themselves and the tasks that they would need a lot of time and support to complete effectively.
Once that was done, I instructed them to consider both lists. My advice was, “If there are one-off items on your list that you can do because they’re quick and easy for you to complete, go for it. If you see one-offs that would require a lot of training or heavy lifting from you, maybe hire someone else for those tasks.”
I know how unattractive a proposal that is when you’re beginning a startup — you want to do things yourself to save money when you don’t have much (or any) coming in. But I would encourage you to look at all the progress you can make on other items when you outsource the more challenging tasks to someone who has a skillset that better suits your pain points. Consider how much time and effort you’re going to save when calculating the real cost of hiring out for a service.
Sounds simple? Good, now I’m going to muddy things further. Once you have a list of ongoing and one-off tasks that you can personally complete, you need to quantify what the return to the organization is for the time you’ve invested. Unfortunately, what I often find is that the things in which I find the most joy are also the lowest return items.
In my experience, the fun, fascinating things I could do in a day simply don’t have the best ROI for the business. Instead, that comes from complicated, difficult things where I have to push my skillset to its limit. So as you begin to look at investing your time in your organization, make sure you’re opting for growth over the pride of doing it all yourself or the enjoyment of completing the fun tasks at work.
Any enterprise is not going to be as simple as just doing one thing all the time. But as Blink 182 so wisely teaches us, it’s all the small things. As a leader, you need to decide how you allocate resources to shepherd your organization through difficult areas and when you need to tackle the little things all by yourself.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a very Irish, very Catholic neighborhood. The Serenity Prayer showed up in just about every household. Whether it was a plaque on the wall or carved into a soap dish, it was a cultural mainstay of that community.
You’ve probably heard this prayer in reference to 12-step groups. It is most well-known for its opening lines: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The way it seemed to be used when I was growing up was closer to, “Help me get through the nonsense my kids are up to, the strength to not yell at them when innocent, and the patience to think so I know the difference.”
Religious origins aside, it’s solid advice for leaders and managers, especially those who are managing staff and dealing with customers. Any time you’re working with people, there are going to be things you can’t control, random data inputs that shape your day and your environment. The key, as the prayer suggests, is to have the wisdom to tell the difference.
It does take a particular kind of wisdom to understand the factors in your business and management structure that you cannot change. By freeing yourself from wasting time and resources on these inalterable elements, you can then reinvest that energy into dealing with things that are within your purview to change.
I see this distinction clearly in a common grievance among managers — difficulty with staff retention. Managers often lament that staff are seeking higher-paying jobs elsewhere, or even that people simply “don’t want to do the work.” While both of these are possible causes of high turnover, I’ve seen this issue play out enough times that I tend to look for causes in other directions first.
Most often, how people are managed has a large impact on whether or not they stick around. Do your employees know what’s expected of them and the responsibilities of the role? In what ways are you supporting them doing their work? If you can’t find easy, satisfying answers to these questions, then it may make more sense to consider issues within your control than to assign responsibility to circumstances at large.
I don’t mean to sound naive — money matters. But even that falls within your sphere of influence, at least to some extent. For employees on the lower end of the pay spectrum, an extra 50 cents or dollar an hour can make a big difference. If you’re having trouble retaining staff on the upper end of that spectrum, pay is an unlikely reason for people to make sudden, unexpected changes.
Telling the difference between things you can and can’t change requires taking a frank inventory of your business and your own management structure. And even if you don’t have control of the problems you’re facing right now, knowing that still gives you power over your situation. Maybe you can’t do anything to fix a difficult market, but you can alter pay scales and work conditions to better meet your staff’s needs.
You can also create new circumstances that are more favorable for your business. Whether that means letting employees bring in pets, giving them more input in their schedules, or allowing part-time remote work. It’s also worth considering any negatives in your workplace. Are you unintentionally rude? Do they need more support? Are they overworked because they’re short-staffed, which makes training more difficult? We have one location where my keeping them in snacks is the key to a happy team. Costco makes this an inexpensive solution.
Taking stock of these realities requires courage and strength. But in nearly every situation, you have tools you can use to make your business a more attractive place for employees.
Of course, there are times when a situation is well and truly beyond your control. Let’s say you’re not getting enough people through the door. During an economic slump and a worldwide downward trend, it makes sense to identify the cause of your problem as something you can’t really help. If these external forces are truly causing your woes, then all you can do is hope for the serenity to navigate trying times.
Last year, we saw two hurricanes tear through our community and severely hamstring the sales of one of our stores. It was painful, of course — our new store was just starting to get its feet under it, but the community was devastated, and we lost a quarter of our sales as we dug ourselves out of that pit.
But at the end of the day, nothing we did could have stopped the hurricane or the harm that it did to our community. So all that was left was to make peace with it. When you have the understanding to identify what’s under your control and what isn’t, you can focus your efforts into areas where they can really make a difference.
The Serenity prayer may be associated with 12-step programs or various Christian traditions, but at the end of the day, the message that you need to pick your battles is something that can benefit all of us.
Lately, a lot of my time has gone toward a new training venture. In this process, I’m documenting skills that I’ve used throughout my career to help new business owners get in front of the very hard learning curve. I’m a “hands-on” manager and prone to jump in, which is often the very wrong answer.
I recently completed the first draft of these training sessions, targeted to people who are starting up a franchise location. When it was ready for feedback, I showed it to a colleague who read through it and then got back to me with the million-dollar question. “This all sounds great, but how do I do this stuff?”
The information in the workbook was good, but I realized that my advice was a lot of high-level strategy. It was missing executable tactics. The more my colleague and I worked on it, the more I refined the core ideas to tie in day-to-day implementation. The concept being someone needs to have the Big Ideas, but having them is not enough. You have to make sure they get done, and it shouldn’t be you doing most of it.
As we worked, a new through-line began to take shape: helping a new entrepreneur quantify the value of their time. I’ve written before about the value of time for an executive, but to my mind, your time becomes even more valuable in an entrepreneurial or start-up role like a franchise. And missteps are more critical.
In a larger organization those at the top have an obligation to create the big plans, and usually their time is allotted that way. You also have a lot more people and a lot more moving parts. Much of the “business” happens regardless of your input. In a small business, you are your organization’s most expensive resource and without you providing the right inputs it may stall on you.
Identifying the best uses for your time, I find it helpful to create AND DEFINE the two buckets that your productive time falls into: working in your business & working on your business.
Working in your business is the hands-on work that you do to facilitate daily business operations. It may be paying bills, engaging with customers, or stocking a shelf.
Working on your business is when you create a process, a sales plan, a new product set, sort out how to inject a lead gen platform, etc.. Your work grows your business in the long term, although it may not generate income that same day.
You may have heard the adage that an owner needs to work on their business, not in their business. Working in the business is very valuable for setting examples, teaching and a customer-feedback loop. You just need to keep it in small doses. There should be a clear limit to how much of this “doing” time you’re giving your business every week. If you are the only person in the business, you have a job by another name. For you to own an enterprise, you need to have others working.
Working on the business is what I used to get done in the office when I was an executive. I’d spend nine to ten hours there a day working on the Big Thoughts: organizational trends and plans. I would have told you all of it was focused and valuable. I was wrong.
With the pandemic and the rise in work from home, I realized that a lot of that time in the office was spent engaging with office culture and the cycles of the building rather than actually making plans and setting them into action.
If I spent ten hours a day in the office, maybe four to six hours of that was spent on deliverable work. And now, even when I have a lot in the “working on the business” bucket, I find that I’m best served by a one-to-two-hour sprint. Not only are these sessions productive, but you’d be surprised how quickly your brain gets tired when you’re focused exclusively on big ideas in front of you, as well as how much you can crank out when focused.
In my experience, one to two sprints once or twice a day will get you much more value for your time than grinding out a ten-hour day. When entrepreneurs and new business owners don’t realize this, they start to wonder why they’re consistently working 18-hour days and doing nothing but spinning their wheels. There is a failure to separate high-value concept work and the linear tasks you have to do to support the organization. Often, it is easy to get sucked into working in your business and then be too worn out to give working on your business the time it deserves.
The solution to this issue is to set aside dedicated time to working on your business so that working in your business doesn’t take over. Believe me, I know how easy it is for one quick question from an employee or customer to turn into hours on the floor.
But I also know that if I spend an hour working on marketing plans for the next month and send out instructions to the relevant parties to get plans in place in advance, we have more sales than if I go into the business, get an idea for a video on the fly, shoot it, and cross my fingers that it gets traction.
I don’t deny that it can be difficult to do. But if you’re spending all day working in your business and not getting anywhere, maybe try stepping back and giving yourself permission to spend more time with higher-level thinking. You have to Define and Defend the “on your business” time and make sure you block it in FIRST during your most productive times. When you find the right balance, you’ll be able to work in your business and enjoy it without sacrificing the forward growth that only you can generate.
Right now, do you pivot or stay the course? Hunker down or rise up? The landscape seems to change not by the hour, but by the minute. As the current presidential administration continues to sow chaos throughout the global economy, it’s nearly impossible for business leaders to stabilize their footing for long enough to make a plan.
The best way I can conceptualize the situation is to compare it to an ice floe. The temperature is just about freezing, but the ice is thin. You may be fine if you stay where you are, but the ice feels shaky and unsteady beneath your feet. In the distance, you can see pieces breaking off and floating away. Do you wait for cracks to start appearing under you, or do you make a break for it?
At this moment in time, there is no good path forward. Everywhere you look, penguins are jumping into the water because something bad is coming.
I can’t offer any certainty in a world that is so profoundly uncertain right now. But I can tell you what I think are some smart steps to take. My first observation is that the market hates uncertainty. Whether you’re receiving products from China and are directly impacted, or you paint houses for a living and the impact is indirect, the uncertainty in the market is going to affect you.
Talking to non-essential retailers, it seems like almost everybody is reporting that their stores have become ghost towns. A big driver in this change is people deciding to make major purchases to lock in prices before the tariffs affect supply lines — cars, dishwashers, etc. Consumers might not need these big purchases right now, but they’re taking money they would otherwise spend on non-essentials in a normal environment.
Adding to this uncertainty is the fact that swaths of the US economy are laying people off to cut costs in an unpredictable time. This leaves people unsure if they’ll have a job in a month, particularly in the public sector, where entire departments can be eliminated seemingly at random. All of this serves to create those cracks in the ice.
First and foremost, my advice is to get your cost structure as low as possible. I realize I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth: layoffs may cause further ripples, but unless you’re cash-rich and ready to weather the storm, get your costs in line. Jettison anything you’re questioning and be as tight as you can, because now is not the time to find yourself without a cash cushion.
At the same time, you have a responsibility to shepherd the emotional health of your team. Your team is just as unsettled as you are. Arguably even more so, actually, if they don’t have decision-making abilities and can only worry about the future of their careers.
If your team has concerns because they see business going away or cuts tightening up or factory floors not running, you need to be up front with your staff. Tell them what you’re thinking and seeing, and give them whatever assurance you can. And if you can’t give them assurances, give them the truth. An uncomfortable truth will do a lot more to create stability and understanding than a comforting lie.
Nobody wants to tell someone that, yes, they could be laid off. But when you deliver that information, tell them what that looks like. In what situation would you need to reduce your workforce? How will you know when you’re at that point? Not only does this give your team some semblance of certainty, but it creates an environment where your team knows what a bad situation for them looks like and has the opportunity to at least try to prevent that from happening.
My final observation is that, while uncertainty incentivizes hunkering down and cutting costs, it also creates opportunity. Sam Walton always says that a recession is a great time to double down on market share. So if you’ve been looking at a new market, new customers, or new areas, now is a good time to reach out. Potential customers might be more open to receiving a message of lowering costs or delivering products faster, especially if your service team is based in the US.
Whatever your value equation is, look at how you can pitch in a chaotic environment to take some more market share. For better or worse, opportunities like this don’t come around all the time.
Above all else, do your best to stay in a good spot. That might be hiking, yoga, or just about anything else, but give yourself time to keep yourself balanced and centered. Nobody else is going to get you off the ice floe, and you have the best odds of success if you’re taking care of yourself.
I don’t see anything that will keep the ice from cracking. It’s just a matter of where and when, and how nimble you are at jumping away from the polar bears.