This week I want to share with you something I learned from a bit of a crazy buddy of
mine that’s a cave diver and how it relates to what’s happening in your business.
Well, it’s really simple. Here’s the lesson:
If you only have one, you have none.
So what does that mean? In the context of cave diving, my friend Rob, he goes down hundreds of feet below water, below the surface and through these caves that are multiple kilometres long.
Can you just imagine being two kilometres into this dark cave with nothing but a little rope to help you find your way back out and your only flashlight battery dies or you drop it and it goes out?
No, that would be dangerous and foolhardy.
So you want to have multiples. Cave divers will take not just multiples but triplicate and quadruplicate of whatever they need of their critical equipment. You don’t want to be without it.
What’s this got to do with business?
Where I see this show up a lot, where people put themselves in a dangerous situation, is where they don’t have choice.
A common example is someone is growing their business and they’re really busy and they don’t think they have time to implement an effective hiring process. In other words, a candidate attraction process.
And they REALLY need to fill a role. They really need to put a body in there.
And what often happens is, someone shows up that has some portion of the required skills, may or may not have a cultural fit, may or may not have all the skills needed, but because they can fill a part of that gap, they are hired. “Okay, get in there.”
So they hire this person and of course it turns out to be a disaster.
And it’s so tough to have to move somebody on from a role that they probably shouldn’t have been in the first place. It costs time, money, frustration, energy, and attention.
What leads a business owner to do that? Well, there’s pressure, right?
We’ve got the pressure to get that role filled. We’ve got customers waiting on the services they can provide, right? And in the mean time, we’re having to do it as the owner, right? We don’t have time for that. We’re doing other things.
So the tendency can be to leap into action or to make snap judgements and decisions and just have the one option, not multiple.
We want to make sure that, especially in the hiring process, that we’re attracting multiple great candidates.
We need an effective onboarding and attraction process.
Another area that I see this come up time to time, is when the business owner is getting ready for what’s next – for that transition, that succession – whether that’s a sale or a merger, whatever it might be.
And if the business owner isn’t ready, they might have a buyer happen to come along. And even though it’s the only buyer they’ve got interested, they start going down the path with that buyer not knowing any other options.
And then that doesn’t always end up with the best offer. So what do we want to do in that case? We want to have our business setup to be the most attractive to the most economical buyers and also structure a deal team. Get the right professionals together that can make sure your business is in the right shape, and that can bring other buyers together for you that are willing to pay a good value for the quality of your business.
So this week, think about this: where have you just made decisions because you’ve been only looking at one option?
How can you go and get yourself other options?
If you’re not sure where to go with that, I’m always happy to have a chat with you to help you get some clarity on where you could go a little bit different in your business to make improvements.
So that’s it for this week, have a fantastic week creating more choice for yourself. Don’t be caught underwater in a cave with just one flashlight, okay?
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