With every one of my clients, this is where we start.
Knowing why you are operating your business is the hardest part of designing your business or preparing to transform.
Traditional Goal setting sets you up for failure
Along time ago I attended a course to ‘transform’ my business and one of the workshops heralded that goal setting was the most important thing to achieving a successful business and then we spent the next 2 hours flicking through lifestyle magazine to create ‘visualised goal boards’ to take home and stick on our fridge to remind us every morning of ‘why’ we were doing this.
Arhhhh!
I hated every minute. Something felt wrong. For one I didn’t find inspiration from the holidays pictured and the clothes and the cars and the watches and the expensive handbags, expensive houses and the yachts! It took me ages to just find pictures of open fields and snow-capped mountains, the sea… but I didn’t need a visualising board to know that what I aspired to was freedom, not money and things.
So when I talk about ‘why’ I know that I am not suggesting you to think about what you want more how does it feel?
Whilst I agree that a positive outlook on the world and the future is beneficial to personal wellbeing and in business, seeing opportunities as they arise, I think techniques like writing down your five-year goals or waking up each morning to a mantra of ‘I will earn X amount in Y years’ (truly a technique that has been advocated) are pointless. But I also think arbitrary goal setting can be very damaging.
The problem is that if you set goals and single minded set out to achieve them you risk setting yourself up for a huge failure. Life just doesn’t work like that. Life throws up all sorts of random variables, by being solely goal-orientated the huge risk and something that is seen time and time again is that you miss the opportunities that come by in the serendipitous ways that opportunities tend to.
Traditional goal setting also sets you up for any failure to only be your own fault because if you don’t achieve those set-out goals because something else like life got in the way, or just misfortune (or the goals themselves being unreasonable) there is no room for reflection on the nature of life and how things ebb and flow and how sometimes things are not just the way you want them to be. There is no room for just bad luck only that you didn’t focus hard enough on those goals or just weren’t positive enough and therefore you only have yourself to blame when you don’t achieve them.
So happy day I don’t do this and nor do I think anyone else should!
Rather, you need to be picturing what a happy successful life feels like to you.
If you need wealth to achieve that then fair enough but deep down it is my experience that is not really what drives people or representative of why they get up in the mornings.
Humans are often much more motivated by connection and relationship to others, feeling valuable (which can include status & money), by being challenged, by learning, by security.
And whilst your life may not deliver these things now, having a good understanding of which of these things do matter to you can help you make instant changes to start achieving that immediately (rather than waiting for your 5 year goal to just deliver it).
Once you have some understanding of this you can relate it to what you are doing now; why you are running your business; what you hoped it would achieve, and why you wanted to achieve that?
The common mistake
I have often had conversations with business owners about growing their businesses. Many who have justifiably proudly, told me about how quickly the business has grown, how turnover is growing year on year, how their family has adapted to it, how the greater turnover requires more hands-on-deck, how their partner has now come on board full time and how they are still growing and this is genuinley fantastic news! I have shared their enthusiasm but then, as the conversation moves on, and we discuss ‘why’ it becomes apparent that unchecked growth of the business and the consequences of that have not been properly explored or considered. Too often the pitfall of ‘goal setting’ is that it becomes money focused without any exploration of how that impacts on lifestyle ambitions.
Recently I was working with a restaurant owner who had, like me, been operating his own independent venues for over 20 years. He had set up & operated 6 venues, in his words he had been ‘successful’ he had paid his mortgage off. But, his income levels had never changed in the whole 20 years, he didn’t have holidays and was on site every day. He now had a new wife who worked with him in the business and a young child.
Because of the nature of his work and because he had never really considered ‘why’ he was doing all this the business was designed to need him or his wife on-site every day just as it had been 20 years ago. They couldn’t take holidays easily and they were never both at home together for significant family time, in short, he had become disillusioned and miserable despite all his business success and all he wanted now was my help to get out of the industry.
Understanding your ‘why is the fundamental starting point for making any decision in your business.
But, the thing is (and why strict goal setting becomes ridiculous) as your life changes your ‘why’ will also change, like everything else in life, things change.
My ‘why’
When I first started with my first venue I was very young, in my early 20’s and all I needed from my business was to provide me with accommodation, pay my bills, and give me a bit of spending money, income was not a priority but serving customers and ‘showing off’ demonstrating that I could operate an excellent venue was really important to me.
I opened my first venue with experience in the industry but only limited management experience. I learnt everything on the job and loved every day of work, serving customers and getting better and better at my job, learning how to market, get my product right and managing staff. I loved the learning so much that I even went back to University and back to studying for a Masters in Business to soak up as much knowledge as possible. I didn’t earn enough for holidays, but I didn’t want them. I was not much interested in taking days off I was having too much fun. My ‘why’ in this business was to have fun, show I could do it and learn.
Fast forward and like everyone else as I got more experienced I wanted greater challenges, on top of which I now had a number of children and so additional income was needed, holidays became more important, not being on-site all day every day important. My business changed to adapt to my life and became much more driven on income and me operating it with more distance.
20 years later and none of my businesses were designed to need me on site. I was running businesses from an office. My lifestyle requirements were the first considerations when designing my businesses. Of course, our customers would never know, the final customer-facing business was still perfectly designed for the target customer and driven by both staff and customer engagement but the decision as to how the business operated or indeed who the target customer would be were made with my own lifestyle as the very first consideration.
So you see, knowing your why and therefore the direction of travel and outcomes you are trying to achieve is essential.
Your readiness to take risks or to throw everything at a project really should be determined by weighing up the value of the outcome in relation to the input, but that is personal to you.
For me, in my early 20’s I was extremely risking tolerant, perhaps so much so that I actively sought it out. I had no assets and no family of my own, I was in a perfect position to throw all my time energy and money into a project. Now much older with 4 kids and a home and a lifestyle to protect I am significantly more risk-averse. The decisions become more laboured and with more care and consideration.
this stuff matters even for the smaller decisions in your business.
Knowing what your ‘why’ is and the considerations relating to you getting what you need from your business changes your approach to product development or staffing plans. Understanding how you want to work on a day to day basis will help inform you where you want to invest in expertise or the types of people you want to work with. Your whole recruitment policy should relate to your personal needs.
If you are capable of soul searching, it is the best way to find your ‘why’ but we don’t need the deep and meaningful but the better you understand your motives the easier it is going to be for you. You only need to share with others what you are comfortable with and it is reasonable to expect that you will never get a full deep understanding, though the more you can understand the better you are going to be able to relate to your customers & staff.
For me, if I were to have a new venue my ‘why’ would be simply because I love the job so much. Income is no longer a driver for me, I have all my material needs. Next time, what I would be searching for would be the lifestyle and the joy.
This industry is in my blood, 25 years have taught me the importance of the pub and why it matters so much to a well-functioning society. I know that that depth of understanding allows me the privilege to serve a community well. I would be completing the circle and ending up with a business close to the one I started over 20 years ago though maybe this time I’ll pay someone else to clean the toilets!
