An Honest Look at Your Business

By: Shaun Kirk

There is a difference between being comfortable and being in
apathy.

It is very comfortable to have a smooth running organization
when you have a team that knows what to do and does it. It is
comfortable to have this group take care of your company and
make it expand, and all you have to do is take care of the team.
It is comfortable when the staff will actually handle the
discipline problems of other staff members and not give it to
you to handle. It is, of course, very comfortable to have a
consistent flow of new customers into your office and not have
to worry about it week to week.

What is apathy?

Perhaps apathy is excuses — thinking that things can’t change,
considering that “this is pretty good” and “I just want
everybody to be happy,” but recognizing that they are not.
Apathy can be present when there are situations going on in the
office that aren’t going well and you choose to ignore it and
hope it will go away. Apathy can be mere excuses and
explanations as to why a situation or problem exists.

Sometimes, as business owners, we can fall into such apathy that
we don’t actually use any tools to evaluate whether the
organization is expanding or not. We wait until the accountant
reconciles the books and tells us whether we did well or poorly.
That’s truly apathy.

Apathy can also be a lack of planning, the “just come to work
and see what happens” attitude. Some business owners at one
point in time used to keep a “to-do” list, now they don’t even
bother. They just wait until they come into the office and one
of the staff members gives them the first order of the day, in
other words, they take orders from their staff. That’s truly
apathy.

Some business owners are doing all right and they are making
good money, but they are not taking care of their staff. They
may have lack of emotion or caring or a general apathy towards
their staff.

Whatever your financial goals are, you probably need to triple
them, because it’s important to take care of the team that takes
care of you. When you recognize what good staff members can do
for your organization and you actually exchange with them for
that good work, it tells those staff members how much you truly
care about them.

When you accept excuses for low productivity, you as a business
owner go more and more into apathy. And so does your team. But
on the other hand, improving the employees’ ability to handle
their jobs well, giving the staff real, obtainable production
demands and getting them to achieve these targets regardless of
the “excuses” is certainly not apathy. It is the ability to make
things happen as an executive.

Many business owners are not satisfied in some way about the
volume of new customers into their business, but most are not
doing anything about it. Now that’s truly apathy! Sometimes we
look around at other businesses that are doing well and blame
them for our lack of success. That is slightly better than
apathy – at least there is some emotion, but the practice owner
still hasn’t done anything about it.

What we are talking about here, plain and simple, is how to
shift from being the effect of your referral sources to being
causative over that relationship. In other words, in regards to
new customers, instead of “look at me and recognize how hard it
is for me to get new customers,” you can shift to “I know how to
drive new business in the door.” One is apathy and the other is
causative. It is first and foremost a shift in viewpoint.

If you don’t have a plan to drive some business in the door, if
you don’t have a solution for this problem and you haven’t had a
solution for years, then most likely you are not very causative
over this area. Most likely you’re in apathy about this area of
your business.

Perhaps you consider it is comfortable if you are making good
money and you’re not working a whole lot. But if you are doing
well and your staff is not doing well, something should change.

A good executive cares enough about what’s going on and cares
about his group. I am not implying that you don’t care about
your staff, that you don’t feel that they are important. I am
sure you recognize that they are. Unfortunately, you can feel
alone sometimes in the running of your business because you make
all the decisions in the organization. You may have a team that
works with you that’s really not a team but a group of robots
that take orders from you all day long. Well that type of
management style would certainly make me or any other business
owner feel like, “why should I take such good care of these guys
when they can’t seem to fight their way out of a paper bag?”

One way in which you can take care of your group is to show them
how they can take care of you. The way you do that is by
managing with statistics and not with emotion. Set good,
acceptable, agreed-upon targets and work with your staff through
whatever barriers that may come up in order to achieve that end.
You can move from being apathetic about certain areas of your
business to being more causative over it.

Imagine the confidence that it will give you and your team when
these key areas are handled in your business. Think of the
reduction in the amount of worry that you may have if you know
and can predict your expansion. But if you are in apathy about
what you can do to increase you numbers, you still are worrying.
It is not like you are off picking daisies, you are still
worrying.

Make no mistake, this is not necessarily easy — it is a fair
amount of work, you have to roll up your sleeves, you actually
have to DO something.

But if you are frustrated, perhaps angry about the way things
are and have gotten to a point where you say, “Look, I need to
freshen up what we already do,” or “I need to do SOMETHING!”
then that change in viewpoint alone can help you get started on
your way.

To summarize:

1)Teach your staff how to take care of you. This is as simple as
telling them what is needed and wanted. It is likely that it
cannot be communicated all in one sitting, but if done well
becomes an ongoing communication.

2)Figure out how take better care of your staff as they start
taking better care of you.

3)Manage by statistics – not with emotion. Take the “office
politics” out of your business. Reward on merit alone – the
merit being “does that employee do their job?” The statistic
will show it; it will either be up or down.

4)And last but not least, change your viewpoint. Quit deciding
situations that are truly not the way you really want them to be
are OK. Decide that they can be different and then go about
working out how to make them so – for the better!

Shaun Kirk:
Shaun Kirk is President and Co-Founder of Measurable Solutions
Inc., a consulting firm engaged in all areas of business
management. Measurable Solutions trains entrepreneurs and
executives how to be consultants to their own businesses, so
they not only can expand their own business but any business.
With his partner, he has built the most rapidly expanding
company of its kind in the world. Visit his website at
www.measurablesolutions.com