Beyond Symptoms: Diagnosing Your Business Challenges

Feeling stuck with persistent business problems? 🛑 Don't just manage symptoms. Let's address the root cause! Join me in the latest episode of The Water Trough as we delve into effective strategies for small business success. 🏆 #Leadership #SmallBizSuccess #RootCause #MisleadingSymptoms

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Hi, it's Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. I find that people often are confused about what a small business coach actually does. I'd like to provide a bit more detail about what I do, the clients I serve, and one particular group of clients, and that is folks in mature businesses that have unresolved challenges. Do you find that some of these things are beyond your expectation, they're very critical, but there's literally nothing you can do about it? Now, this is not unusual. The reason this occurs is largely because we're not familiar with the real cause of our problems. Going back to the origin of my title as The Small Business Doctor, we are really good at identifying symptoms. We do a good job of treating those symptoms. That is to say, we do what we think we need to do to make things better. However, symptoms are evidence of something more obscure, something very well hidden, and something we really don't understand. So, while we're busily treating symptoms, and often doing the same things over and over again, the problem is not getting better. It's merely growing, or at least continuing at the same pace. In a business, this practice can become profound. It can lead to a complete disruption of business. It can lead to the dissolution of a business. Well, needless to say, nobody wants that. I recall a client years ago, a gentleman who had a history of building and selling businesses. For the first time in his life, he had a business that was not able to sell his product. He felt that there was a problem with the sales process. In fact, he spent tens of thousands of dollars on sales training for his sales team. When I asked him what he felt about his sales team, you know, "Do you hire good salespeople?" He said, "Absolutely." I couldn't help but to come back and say to him, "If you hire great salespeople, why do they need sales training?" That caught his attention. Immediately he paused and recognized that he did what he thought was the right thing to do. He figured that there's something they need to learn. He had the money. It wasn't a big deal to him. So he just decided, "Hey, let's use sales training. That will fix the problem." It did not. In fact, in the course of our time working together, talking with himself, his sales team, his executives, his customer service staff, and customers, we identified the source of the problem. The source of the problem isn't important here. What is important is that he took the fastest, most obvious approach, and that is to apply a certain medication, if you will, to this perceived illness. And it was the wrong choice. In fact, he had the answer right in front of him all along. Yet ironically, he spent all that money seeking something that did not help him out at all. This sort of situation is not unusual. In business, particularly in privately owned small businesses, we tend to be very proud of the fact that we've accomplished what we have. And we should be very proud of what we've done. It's important to acknowledge our value, the effort that we've made, the things that we've done. To admit that something is not working is a difficult thing to do. Well, no we don't want things to fail, but we really don't want to admit that we don't know what's going on. And so we're readily able to adopt and adapt whatever kind of treatment is available based upon our limited understanding of what the problem is. If we get lucky, and it's not to say we don't and can't, we might be able to solve the problem. Or, as in the case of this gentleman, that wasn't enough. My point is this. There's no shame in looking to maximize the growth, development, and sustainability of your business. There's no shame in acknowledging that business, as with everything else in life, is not perfect. There are going to be times when things aren't going to go as we hoped they would. The key is making the decision to take steps that will resolve the issue. Sure, you can go ahead and identify the symptoms and treat them initially. And you find you're getting traction, things are improving, fantastic. But you have to also have a means of assessing the outcome of the efforts that you make. You have to have a means of determining that the steps you're taking are actually moving you in the right direction. Because an underlying illness will continue to fester if the wrong medication is applied. And again, that medication is applied because we are basing our assumption on what we think the underlying illness is, but we're not fully aware of what it is. So when you think about your own situation, ask yourself this. Do you have challenges that have gone unresolved? Do you have challenges that have grown increasingly more problematic? Challenges that have moved from minor irritants to potentially deleterious scenarios? Do you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly or trying newfangled ideas to fix this? And yet still things are not moving in the right direction. If you do find yourself in this situation, it's very likely that you too have identified symptoms, but do not know, do not understand, or recognize what the underlying illness is. That's my challenge to you today. Take a look at how your business is going. Identify all the things that are going well. Highlight them, maintain them, repeat them. Certainly don't let them go unnoticed. But pay close attention to the things that aren't working out, even the trivial ones, because they too can grow in magnitude. And take a deep look at what might be giving rise to this sort of thing. Ask your staff at all levels, those with particular knowledge of the area in which your challenges, your concerns are based, what they think, what they've observed. Business owners are not the best equipped to identify these things. They've got a lot of things to do, a lot of things on their plate. Take advantage of your staff. They are the experts. They know what's going on. And if you find yourself in a position where despite these efforts, you're still not able to move beyond this, consider reaching out to someone who can help you to peel away the layers of obvious symptoms and truly understand what is at the root of your business challenges. Until next time, this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I want to wish you a healthy business.