FIR 107: Motivators For Peak Performance

Financial Investing Radio

In this episode, we look at the question, what kind of motivation is needed to scale my business? Is there a kind of motivation that will enable my business to grow and scale?

Hi everybody, this Grant, thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. Okay, so we're looking at this question around motivation. And what does it mean? How do I actually apply motivation in terms of scaling my business? So I was looking at some examples of companies small to medium businesses that had gone through these pivotal moments right in their organization. I got some of these out of a New York Times article, actually, this was interesting. I'll go through a few, a few examples here.

Here's the first one. So one of these, it was a concierge service, right. And it was this woman who was an intelligent entrepreneur that had started by spending, you know, lots of hours doing errands and handling tasks for multiple clients. In fact, it looked like she took on more than she could handle. Now as the economic conditions changed around her in our environment. Clients began dropping off, right. And ultimately, she decided to close the business. Later, upon reflection, she said, and I quote, I realized that I didn't love what I did. All right, that's an interesting one. Here. Here's another case, right? In this case, it was a company, they had developed a website for parents and family members, right? They're really looking to create a community. Now this is also during some of the early days of Facebook as well.

Now the company was gaining some interest in venture capitalist. But they started to focus more on building new features, new bells and whistles, right? Oh, I can notify you about this appointment or this thing going on here or there. And what happened is, they lost the focus of what their main premise was, which is around building communities, ultimately, the pressure, right, and the growth, obviously, of Facebook, but grew so much that they ultimately they shut down, they had to shut down the company. here's a here's another one. Third one. This was an architecture design firm, and they were mostly doing commercial work. And when some economic conditions around them changed, and they you know, they started to have the same experience, right, clients are canceling work.

And with scarce work, the bigger firms started coming in and competing in their space. Now, too much of their work was in the private sector, and they ignored the public sector where government funding was was taking place. Well, ultimately, the company had to shut down. Okay, so I want to share another story here. This is one from one of my first startup companies, and we kept approaching the healthcare market with one solution. And we just stayed committed to that. Within one year, we were closing the doors, we closed the doors. Were we motivated? Absolutely. We were motivated. The question is, what kind of motivation is needed to scale my business? Right to make it evergreen to keep it going?

What are the kind of motivators really to launch your peak performance? I think there's a common thread among the stories that I shared. One common thread is that all of the business owners were motivated to see their business succeed, except one of them, right, which is the lady who discovered that she didn't love the business. But for the most part, there was a motivation to succeed. My question is, what other shared motivations were there across those, I think there is a shared motivation to stick to their plan and not adjust. And in fact, not adjust to the point that they didn't take into consideration broader market conditions or technologies or competitors. And when I say they, I'm pointing the finger at myself, I didn't do that. My first one, right? We just were like, oh, we're going after healthcare, and we just got one thing and that's it. And then maybe we could just talk louder, right? It'll, it'll make a difference. There needed to be this ability to pivot. So building a scalable business requires us to have the motivation to pivot. So let's focus on on This part, what what motivation, if I have a motivation to run my business or to build my business, I must have as part of that motivation, the motivation to make adjustments now to pivot our business means that we need to let go some things we have formally committed to. And typically we're committing to them mentally and financially and emotionally.

Many of us, right, we know who Mark Cuban is, right? He's a well known name and face out there. His comment on this was, Hey, be open to your current employees and your customers and evaluate the feedback. So he's looking at if you're going to pivot, be very open and candid about that. All right. That's a possible way to look at that. Some say that pivoting is a change in strategy without a change in vision. All right, that might be a way to look at it as well.

But here's one thing I thought was interesting. There's his name. His name's Steve Rogers. He's, he's a Harvard professor. Anyway, he talked about pivoting as well, I thought he had a couple of interesting comments here, one of them that he that he made was, he said, like, the willingness on your part to do something different than what you were originally doing? Right. And he focused on willingness. I agree with that, that in order for me to pivot my business, I have to have this willingness to do this.

In fact, 93% of all successful entrepreneurial companies have pivoted at least one time. So if we look at small businesses, and we look at the number of those that don't survive, of those that survive 93% have pivoted at least one time, it means that at some point, they let go something they'll let go of what the original vision or strategy was, or the original tactics are the original products, they went after that. One of the approaches to do this is to embrace what Steve Rogers called the theory of sunk cost, right? Remember that back to your college days, right? What sunk cost is, it's where yesterday's investment should not impact tomorrow's decisions gotta let go of yesterday, that can be a tough thing. We all heard the story of monkeys, right?

How you could capture a monkey, right? You cut a hole on a tree, and then you put the piece of fruit in it, and the monkey reaches in and grabs the fruit and won't let go. And that sometimes reflects us as small medium business owners, right, we won't let go of something. In fact, what we really need to do is to free ourselves, to respond to what our actual calling is to do something better. Because ultimately, as a small to medium business owner, you're really benefiting so many people, obviously in terms of lives and jobs and prosperity, really impacting people's ability to raise families and so forth. So the real challenge is, let go, don't let our investments and yesterday affect our decisions tomorrow, hey, I've made that mistake. And I've had to learn from that mistake.

So embrace this theory of sunk cost, right? It will make our life easier, yes, it will improve our chances of success, we may have to pivot quite a few times. In fact, I think my son Steve talks about, he pivoted 34 times till the found, all right, this is where he's going to focus on and got his vein of value, right, each of us have to find the vein of value. So people that have succeeded at pivoting. Here's a really big example. We all know Johnson and Johnson, originally, everything that they put into their products was wax, and I believe was the son. I think his name is Sam Johnson, at one point in the company history came forward.

And he said, I've got an idea, dad, and it requires product that doesn't have wax in it. And he brought forward the idea of raid, you know, kill the pests, right pesticide. So although it didn't have wax in it, they did it the company pivoted. So it's critical for us to learn this lesson. One of the startup companies that I was involved with early on in Silicon Valley, we were building software tools for a specific market. But we could see the tide shifting right. And we needed to be able to apply our skill sets and interests elsewhere. So what I did was I began to focus on the commercial market, we pivoted our messaging, our product set, and the kinds of customers we're going after now it worked, it ended up really growing and saving the company.

Interestingly, though, years later, we pivoted back to that original former product set and client set, but the timing was better than at that point. So sometimes you can go back to what the original passion was. But the key is to find those veins of value. And we have to pivot many times as small to medium business owners in order to do that. Alright, so what's the right kind of motivation that we need? It's the motivation to pivot Those are the organizations that tend to scale and continue to evergreen and grow. Okay, everybody, this is grant. Thanks again for joining. Until next time, find the motivation to pivot.

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