I see a lot of spinning tires and smell burning rubber as a result of businesses losing traction in today’s economy. Can you afford to stay where you are in your business or keep doing what you are doing and spinning your wheels without achieving the results you want? What can help you increase or improve your traction?
What is true about 99.9% of everything your company does? You’re right – people or relationships are involved. You need greater traction – more profits, more customers, more sales, increased productivity and efficiency, increased cash flow, more capital and reduced expenses – and the common denominator is people or relationships!
Where or on what is your focus today? Profits, sales, customers, or capital? What you focus on is where your energy goes. If you are not getting good traction – your focus may be off.
The key today for many business owners is to find the power, the push or pull or both to move their business out of its present condition or situation. Where is your power today?
My experience has shown that profit, sales, customers and capital are all the fruit of well developed and maintained relationships – employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, community, competitors, alliance partners and all stakeholders in your business. Where you are not receiving traction – push and pull in your business – is where relationships have not been properly developed and maintained.
Many businesses are like a car stuck in sand or mud with tires that are spinning rapidly, trying to grab onto something, to propel it forward yet all it is doing is spinning at an ever increasing speed, losing tread (gripping power, influence and authority) and smelling badly as it burns itself out.
Tachi Kiuchi and Bill Shireman, authors of “What We Learned in the Rainforest” – one a hard-nosed CEO of a major corporation and the other a dedicated environmentalist, learned from their numerous trips to the rainforests that the most valuable resource in the rainforests was not the timber that could be cut down and hauled out to make things, the therapeutic and medicinal value of the plants and minerals that could be mined and sold, or the exploitation of the various other resources found there. They discovered the most valuable resource of the rainforest was the relationships found and displayed there – the vast array of individual designs – with each filling a particular niche. Through these relationships they witnessed and learned how the forest sustained itself in the face of limits or shortages (droughts). They learned how each species used its niche efficiency (special, unique gifts and talents) which was a source of net gain in the forest – or its source of “profit.”
What Kiuchi and Shireman learned quite accidently in the rainforest was how interrelationships and interdependence (versus independence) displayed by nature actually produced gains or “profit” in business terminology. This demonstrates something that business owners should seriously note and apply to gain traction.
People, whether in their personal lives or businesses, were created for relationship. Rugged individualism and the independence of the entrepreneur are promoted as distinguishing marks of American heroes, however, such self-sufficiency can lead to relational poverty. I believe each person is called to do something great, but no one can do it alone.
What fosters good relationships? The grease or glue is LOVE.