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I am a thinker. Mostly, I think about the success of people and teams. This requires me to try to answer basic questions such as, “How is success defined and achieved?” and, particularly relevant at this moment, “How do we avoid failure?”
The business equivalent of a world war is happening right now. This pandemic is the fastest destroyer of business and jobs we have ever seen. In just four weeks, 22 million people in the U.S. have become newly unemployed. Imagine every California employee losing their job in one month.
Biologically, success is living. While living isn’t the measure of success in business, a company dying certainly is a failure. Companies are walking a tightrope between life and death right now, and many more perish each day that current business conditions continue. But as business owners, we can’t and won’t let down our customers, investors or colleagues.
To succeed, businesses must embrace a journey of excellence. Excellence in the near term is figuring out how to provide innovative improvements to services and products to be the solution customers want in the post-crisis reality. Success often reveals itself in sales, so go find those new revenue channels.
My own journey has seen brief periods of excellence and success. Money is an important byproduct, but less meaningful and far less enduring than success. I’ve also been lacerated by the blade of failure, and still feel its enduring pain. As good as winning is, failure is multiple times the inverse.
My children used to have nightmares of monsters. I still have them. Recently, my wife recounted over breakfast my REM sleep utterances: I scream about competition and fret-babble about the inches I could have gained if only I’d acted to grab more progress before time slipped away.
What are inches? The journey of excellence is many hard miles, and it is traveled by the inch. The inches we need to succeed are all around us. These inches are earned by the things we do and gained through the people we help. Do you see the inches? Some are in plain sight and can be grabbed with little effort. Most are easy to turn a blind eye to, or avoid, because they look like hard work. We must take action and master value-creating work for all our stakeholders, and we must do it before time slips away, never to return. Tenacity is required for the mental, physical and emotional endurance to make progress each day, each hour and each moment on the journey of excellence.
The next inch of progress is out there, and that inch can be haunting. Even winning teams usually win by just inches, because markets are competitive, and margin for error is small. Especially now.
Creative destruction is happening all around us. We can be victims of change, or we can be the creators and beneficiaries of it. Business is a relative race, and sometimes one can get further ahead just by losing fewer inches through avoiding the many traps failure sets. By gaining all these inches individually and together, businesses can travel farther and faster on this journey toward success.
As you embark on your journey of excellence, consider the following inches:
• Keep safety in mind, and roll out new and innovative best practices.
• Ensure 100% commitment to client service. Call, email and text your clients to ask them how you can help them apply for CARES Act funding, offer remote work strategies or provide additional services that may help.
• Remember that clear, timely and transparent communication to equity investors and lenders is essential.
• Hold yourself and colleagues accountable to execute on schedule and budget.
• Customers find and stay with you because of the quality and price of what you offer, but now, you need to raise the bar even higher. How?
• Find cost savings by requoting anything you possibly can — remember, firms are hungry for new business.
• Consider your capital cushions. Find vendors that will take earlier payment for a discount.
• Maintain your value investment focus. Do not try to catch the falling knife of asset pricing. Identify potential opportunities now, but wait for capital markets to reopen, and then be early in buying troubled assets to turn into winners.
• Be creative — it has never been easier to try new things. Build on and improve ideas; don’t be the cancerous shark who just points out negatives.
• Subordinate your ego. Your job has fundamentally changed, so look for new responsibilities, and identify opportunities where your skills can add value.
The opportunity for business to positively lead society has never been bigger. Continue to work hard and stay humble, and be on the front side of the wave of progress.