The best time to write a blog I’ve found is when I’m sick or tired. Being both sick and tired this week, it is the perfect storm so to speak.
My usual musings on paper are usually reserved for 5am international flights (tired) and when I have time on my hands waiting for delayed flights and preparing to stand in endless queues. Or when I am unable to get out and about as usual due to some totally debilitating disease like a cold … okay I am a wuss when it comes to being sick.
During these perfect storms, I complain a lot, vent a lot, push all the wrong buttons with everyone around me, and basically contemplate my own mortality. Oddly I find that such times bring clarity and perspective to what things I prioritise in my life.
But it also sometimes brings clarity as to how I see my clients prioritising things in their own lives … or perhaps I just see it that way through the medicinal haze.
As a strong advocate of meetings over coffee, I value face-to-face interaction above all other forms of communication. Dinosaurs like me still gather more information in direct discussions, and can provide more meaningful advice, over coffee with a pen on the back of a stained napkin than by any other medium of interaction.
So, when I refer to clarity regarding clients prioritising things in their own lives, I mean I reflect on discussions during recent coffee meetings, WhatsApp chats, Skype and Zoom calls, and the handwritten scribblings that I keep in my A5 sized notebook.
Here is the clarity I found during my perfect storm this week (at least the part that relates to business, not my mortality):
- My clients like to talk to me, and me to them.
Simple truth that if a physical meeting is not possible, then a voice call will do. Emails exchanges are nice, good to provide paper trails, but will never replace the sound of a voice, or the exchange of information and emotions by simply listening and talking.
With my ‘deathly’ cold this week, I managed to croak my way through several very valuable calls, and I glad that I did. While not the same as a coffee meeting, granted, these were still useful and provided immediate feedback and importantly calls to action with every conversation. So, I email as little as possible and talk/listen as much as I can.
- Plans change.
Business is part science and part art, usually just a whole lot of hard work and some luck. But client’s plans change, every day – for their businesses and their estate/succession planning. What worked last year, won’t necessarily work this year. The last piece of valuable information kept safely on a napkin will need to be updated, modified, maybe thrown out and done again.
For most small business owners, their lives are inextricably linked to their businesses. It is not a 9-to-5 job but 24/7 and means their whole life’s work. Changes in the external environment (politics, taxation, banking, just to name a few) often immediately impacts small businesses, and consequently the personal lives of the business owners. So, what was planned for last year, may not even be on the agenda this year. I often help clients with business plans complete with three-year forecasts, market analysis and so on. But many businesses will have little visibility beyond the current year, unless they have a significant amount of forward orders, so the plan will need to be reviewed, amended, perhaps abandoned and a new plan created.
For small business, partnerships/multiple shareholders are just marriages in another form, and ‘divorces’ can be very messy. A lot of work and planning goes into getting married, but I have not seen too many divorces end well. Much of this relates to shareholder agreements but, in the end, it comes down to trust and control – a good measure of each is necessary to make it work, and to exit if the marriage doesn’t work out as planned.
And then there is the issue of immortality. When we are sick, our mortality is very apparent, and we worry about all the things we should have done. Then we are well, we are suddenly immortal again so no need to do any planning, right?
- Need to simplify.
Probably the most obvious one. But never more apparent than when we lose a day or two because we are really sick, or when we are stuck somewhere without the phone or internet; or tragically we lose someone important to us. I am convinced that so much of what we do is ‘stuff’ and serves little purpose other than to keep us busy because we feel it must be done. Change our reality for a day or two because of circumstances out of our control, then most of what we routinely do seems trivial – in business and our personal lives.
In my opinion you could interchange the word ‘prioritise’ here just as easily with ‘simplify’. If you are as much as a believer in Chaos Theory as I am, then you may feel that much of what happens within our lives in not within our control. So if we can’t control everything in our environment, we can at least focus on the parts that we can.
In my early years of learning how to be a manager, my boss would often say to me “what would happen if you didn’t do …?” If the answer was ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing bad’, then why do it? Yes, I know, life and certainly business doesn’t always work that way, it is great way to sort priorities and to simply what we do in business.
There is no moral to the story here. And my ‘aha’ moments of clarity during such times would likely be very different to that of others. But one universal truth is that being sick and tired is no fun for anyone.
