What would you do if your revenue crashed 80 percent in eight weeks?
While that’s unlikely to happen, you can use that question as a frame for figuring out what bold moves you could initiate over the next few months that will position your firm for long-term profitable growth.
By making changes now from a position of strength, you increase the resiliency of your company and create the space to respond powerfully when a real emergency arises.
Here are three “bold moves” you can initiate right now.
1. Fire—then rehire—yourself.
As the founder of the company, it can be hard to get a “detached” perspective on what you can/should do in your business. Your identity might be tied up in what you’ve done up to this point to get your company where it is, and to make bold changes might mean you have to admit that what got you here won’t get you there.
Changing direction and changing people is never easy, especially if your business is performing well and you’re not in an emergency situation.
One way to jumpstart change is to do what former Intel CEO Andy Grove did. He’s famous for “firing” himself when the company faced a “bet the company” decision on whether or not to stay in the memory chip business.
To answer that question, he asked Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?” Moore said the new CEO would get them out of the memory chip business. Cleverly, Grove responded, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
Using this metaphorical “fire yourself,” Grove was able to detach and free himself from the baggage of past decisions that no longer made sense. With this new sense of freedom, he could start a new strategy with a clean slate.
Map out what would happen if you continue on your current course for the next five years. Then, fire yourself and develop a new strategy as if you were a new CEO coming in cold from the outside. What would your strategy be if you felt no constraint from “That’s the way we’ve always done it”?
Develop your plan and then execute the plan.
2. Go for the triple double.
A triple double is doubling your business … three times. In other words, it’s an 8x increase in your business. Whoa.
Imagine for a moment that your business is 8x its current size. What’s your immediate, visceral reaction?
Excitement? Fear? Challenge? Not worth the effort?
Achieving a triple double goal is not nearly as important as what you and your company become along the way. Done in good faith, here are a couple benefits of this stretch goal.
First, growing 8x can increase your impact 8x. And even if you fall short, you will likely be much further ahead than if you set a more conservative goal.
Be inspired by the goal, but not so fixated on it that you lose sight of an unfolding path that might lead to an even better outcome.
Second, going for a triple double requires you to shift from incremental thinking to exponential thinking. Incremental thinkers focus on incremental growth. They look for ways to grow 10 – 15 percent per year. Sure, that’s nice growth, but you’re simply not going to hit a triple double by growing 10 – 15 percent per year so you need a new framework for thinking about growth.
A key benefit of the triple double is it requires you to elevate your thinking. It requires you to breakout of living in the highly probable and predictable world to moving into the realm of aspirational possibility.
3. Make yourself irrelevant to your business.
This might seem a little strange but the more valuable you are to the business, the less valuable the business is. If you can’t step away from the business for a material amount of time and have it still fire on all cylinders while you’re gone, then you don’t have a business, you have a job.
Imagine for a moment if you could take material time away from your business to just…think. Or explore. Or recharge. Or get fit. Or meditate. Or travel the world and pay attention to what’s going on. Do you think you’d come back from that time away with a renewed sense of purpose and energy?
Traveling the world and not checking in with the office is not the only measure of how irrelevant you are to your business.
The measure of your business is how little you’re needed in the day-to-day running of it. When you are free from the constraints of always being “on,” you become free to explore the edges of your opportunities. You become free to sense the next wave that your business can ride and you start to envision what your business could become in its next iteration.
Those of you who read this article and “go deep” with these three bold moves, who embed them into your very fiber and act on them, will be the same advisors who 5 years from now will have grown their business and improved their quality of life by an order of magnitude.
Click here to learn more about ROL Advisor’s digital discovery tools, then sign up for a 7-day trial to become a better Life Centered Financial Planner, and finally, schedule a demo.