Is Competition Really a Barrier to Your Success?

The only barriers that are worth solving are the barriers that actually keep you from winning the game. If you aren’t sure what the game is, then you might consider any problem in your office significant enough to handle. This could be something such as having two staff members not getting along and you spending an afternoon trying to patch things up, when most likely if you’d just throw them in a room they’d work it out and you could get back to solving the barriers that are in the way of your practice goals being achieved. A true barrier is something that you must confront fully and handle or you will never get to the next step.

Sometimes a barrier could be a thought or consideration that you put in front of you to keep you from doing something courageous or starting something new. These thoughts are in place so you can sleep better at night. What do I mean by that? Well, if you consider that there’s too much competition in your area as the reason you’re not doing well, then you don’t have to do anything about it — unless you plan on taking out your competition, which I doubt is on your list of things to do. The fact is, there isn’t such a thing as too much competition: take a look around at the number of people that need your service or product. All you have to do is become better known and better respected than other companies who sell that product or deliver that service. You may not know how, but because you don’t know how, you commonly have to put a barrier there or a reason why you are not doing well.

Honestly take a look at the barrier of “there is too much competition.” What are your true options about that? What can you actually DO to change that? Think about that for a minute. You cannot change competition – to eliminate competition would be to move, and have you ever heard of a business moving out of a densely populated area with a lot of demand for their services or product to a remote area and doing better? Chances are they didn’t do better.

Well, what are your options then? Burn the place down? Not much of an option. The only option you have is to change the public’s opinion about you so that they choose you over your competition.

Imagine how much less stress you would have if you knew exactly what to do each day to make your business expand. What if you could spot when someone placed a barrier in front of you whether it was worth one nanosecond of your time to solve? Would you have more freedoms? Could you actually focus more on your purpose to provide the best service in your area? I bet that you could.
The recognition of the true barriers to your business expansion will greatly enhance your freedoms and allow you to expand your company. Many businesses don’t even set a goal to beat last week’s sales or production because they are so mired down with all the problems of the day-to-day company. This indicates a game with too many barriers and that’s a game that you can never win.

How to Effectively Deal with Staff

Business owners I have met commonly know what they should do but most of the time they lack the courage to make the decision and act. I see this so often — an owner knows exactly what he needs to do to expand his organization or handle a particular staff member, but chooses to do something else; something easier to face, something easier to confront. This choice, in essence, makes him do the wrong thing. A real leader is one who does the right thing for the group even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest.

If you formulate a positive plan, if you get agreement on it from your staff, if you are not weak about your orders and if you follow through and get compliance, you will expand.

We find in a less courageous leader an inability to issue an order and probably more importantly the lack of the ability to get compliance to that order. These are two vital abilities that any leader must possess. The ability to make the call and the ability to make sure it gets done.

If you were able to face things in your organization without flinching or avoiding, if you were able to make the tough decisions and knew you were at least 51% correct in those decisions, if you were able to get others to get the work done and enforce compliance to your orders, you would find you would become significantly more successful and you would sleep better at night.

What do I mean by that? Let’s say you are looking at trying to solve a problem and you work out the solution. But the solution, however simple, is difficult to face. Perhaps it requires the termination of a staff member. Perhaps it requires changing how you have always done things. Perhaps it has the possibility of upsetting someone. So you choose to do something else. Something less right, or something more wrong. And when it doesn’t turn out exactly the way you want it to, you look at this and although you might feel frustrated, you apathetically write it off as experience.

But if you have the ability to face it, if you have the ability to tell that staff member something that you know might initially upset him/her and in the end gain the agreement of the staff member that it is the right thing to do, you find that the stress associated with not facing something, is significantly higher than just facing it.

Have you ever lain awake at night trying to figure out how you were going to handle a particular staff situation? Perhaps you have someone who is basically causing trouble whenever you are out of the office for a day or two. You find you are always calling in to check on this staff member to see if he or she is causing any difficulties or problems for others in your absence. You think about this person all of the time. Basically you know you should fire this staff member, but you lack the courage to do it. Your group is looking to you to handle it. You lie in bed at night and think it through and what you dream up is something way more difficult to handle than just walking in and telling Joe that he needs to knock it off or he is gone.

The solution is simple – make the call and get it done. If you do that you win, your business wins and your staff issues will become a thing of the past.

How Much Money is Poor Morale Costing Your Company?

As a business owner I’ve had staff come and go over the years. Some have done extremely well and others not so well. During the time I was directly involved in running my business I found some weaknesses in myself that tremendously affected things that were going on. It was not uncommon for me, whenever something was not going well, to ignore it. Sometimes I would hope it would go away or I might ask somebody else to solve it for me, whatever was going on.

As time went on I started to actually think negative thoughts about a certain staff member or staff members that I had difficulties communicating to. I would have thoughts that perhaps they should move on – why don’t they just quit? If I wasn’t happy somewhere I would just quit. Why won’t they? As time went on these people would usually just end up leaving or I would be forced to fire them. As I learned more about how to better run my business I realized that nearly every one of these situations of the unfortunate firing or the employee quitting directly pointed back to my inability to communicate. Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t as though I was completely and utterly responsible for what other staff members were doing that led to their termination, but prior to things getting so bad that somebody needed to be fired, I needed to act and did not.

As an example, let’s say that a staff member walks in 20 minutes late for work. As he walks in the door you glance in his direction. He now knows you know that he is late. But yet you don’t say anything about it. Let’s say it happens again the very next day and you notice it again. You see him coming in, and he doesn’t say anything and you don’t say anything either. After a while don’t you think that employee will think it is acceptable to come in 20 minutes late. Since you don’t say anything it must be alright.

That’s possibly just the first time where things were not okay with a particular staff member, but it created a license to kind of push the edge of the envelope since it didn’t seem like you would do anything to exert proper discipline. If you just would have said to the staff member who came in late, “Hey, what happened? You’re late.” in a very friendly manner and heard what he had to say and just acknowledged it, that might have handled it all by itself and things would have been fine. But you didn’t, because it was a little uncomfortable for you. Wouldn’t it have been a whole lot easier to confront at that time than to deal with more serious disciplinary actions later simply because you wouldn’t hold your position as an executive?

When you have a staff member situation that you are not quite handling the way you should you usually go home and talk to somebody, like your spouse, about that staff member. You usually are not saying great things about that staff member, and you consider that he or she is not as valuable to you. Well, those critical thoughts and comments regarding that staff member will likely not get him or her to advance in the business.

If you look over your time as a business owner or manager you may find that with any staff member that ever quit, you knew that they were going to quit before they quit. You start noticing that the more negative thoughts that you have about the staff member, the less likely they have a chance of making it. It is pretty interesting. If you start thinking that you have the best staff – that these people will do anything for you – and you start treating them as though it is true, well guess what? It will become true. But if you consider that you have staff that, quite honestly, are less than ideal, who won’t go to bat for you, who are just trying to put in time and get a paycheck, versus being loyal and dedicated to the expansion and purpose of your organization, you’ll get exactly that too.

Usually you find how a business is doing based upon how the owner is doing. Is he or she happy? Can he or she get things done all by himself or herself? It is a barometer of you. If you are not doing well, your business doesn’t do well. A very simple place to start is by considering that you have very willing staff members who are completely on the team, playing by the same rules as everyone else. When something just doesn’t seem right, you should go to that individual and talk to him or her about that concern that you have, and you’ll find that the practice will run more smoothly and things will be easier.

Find out what really is going on, because that is part of the hat of being an executive. It is all up to you, as it always has been.

Common Barriers to Your Business Success

I recently realized something that I consider to be relatively important and I wanted to share it with you. Over the past few years and I’ve heard some interesting reasons as to what is holding a practice down and keeping it from expanding. I’ve heard things such as “there is too much competition” and “times have changed” and “government regulations are the root of all evil and must be destroyed” I’ve heard them all.

As a practice owner, I used to agree with these reasons quite a bit. When I first decided to learn how to better run my practice I hired a consultant and I remember a particular conversation with her whereby she asked me something that I considered rather rude: she asked me why I was not successful. I was very surprised and somewhat angered that she asked me this directly. At first I didn’t answer, I just kind of looked at her and shrugged my shoulders. So she asked me again, “Why are you not as successful as you know you should be?” I said “I can’t believe you’ve asked me that question. I’ve paid you some money and you’re insulting me?” She laughed, but persisted and asked me the question again, “So Shaun, tell me, why aren’t you as successful as you know you could be?” I hate to say it but I then became really angry. I went on for about 15 minutes giving all the reasons why I couldn’t be as successful as other physical therapy practice owners.

After blurting out all my reasons for failure, my consultant very calmly said to me, “I’m going to tell you something that might upset you. Are you ready?” I said yes. She said “Your success or failure in your practice is your own doing and as soon as you really understand that, you’re on your way out of it.” At that moment in my life it was more truth than I’ve ever heard. It put me completely flat back into the chair. I said, “Wow. So what do I do?” She replied, “We’ll show you what to do, but you have to change your mind about a few things. You have to change your mind from ‘I have all these reasons why I cannot be successful’ to ‘I can and will be successful.’” So off we went and my practice continued to expand from that point.

At the beginning of this article I mentioned that I had a bit of a revelation when I realized something. Now I’m going to tell you what it is. After hearing very many business owners complaining about all the reasons why they aren’t doing well, I spotted this one very simple thing. They are paying attention to all the barriers to their success.

But what are the barriers? The barriers are nothing more than something that you consider will stop you. If you consider that you can’t drive new business in your doors, you’ll have trouble with that. If you consider that you can’t find good people, you’ll always look around and have a staff that you’re never quite happy with, because you can’t find good people. The truth is, you can find good people, but you consider that you cannot, so therefore you cannot.

My point is, I realized that all my past excuses and all the excuses I’ve heard since from other practice owners as to what is holding down the business are simply things that are considered or believed to be true. They are not physical barriers, such as a wall or something that you can touch – they are things that you think will hold you back.

Sometimes what is holding you back is a fear of failing, and that fear of failing keeps you from starting anything or “sticking your neck out” so to speak. Sometimes what keeps you from doing well is thinking “if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself.” That’s the hallmark of an overworked executive. With this thought in place you become exhausted and burn out while the other staff cut out early to go to a soccer game or something like that and dump the work on you.
The only barriers that are worth solving are the barriers that actually keep you from winning the game. If you aren’t sure what the game is, then you might consider any problem in your office significant enough to handle. This could be something such as having two staff members not getting along and you spending an afternoon trying to patch things up, when most likely if you’d just throw them in a room they’d work it out and you could get back to solving the barriers that are in the way of your practice goals being achieved. A true barrier is something that you must confront fully and handle or you will never get to the next step.