If you’re not moving forward or growing, you may be standing still or even moving backwards. What does this mean? I probably don’t have to explain to you what growth looks like. It is a condition of the mind, it is intuitive to life and anyone knows if they are growing or not. The hard part is admitting lack of growth and doing something about it. Choosing to grow is a choice, like exercising or eating healthy.
Reality is that the world, and the way we do things, is changing faster and faster. Keeping up with the pace can be really hard. Since I contend that a growth and service mindset is essential to relevance in today’s marketplace, I had to consider the “keeping up” factor before I went into business. Here’s how that looked for me.
Both award businesses I bought were at a point where they were experiencing years of declining sales. A small business naturally loses a few customers every year due to attrition. Customers die, they retire and move on to other employment. But the key to a healthy business is whether it can consistently replace those customers lost to attrition with new customers.
Don’t misunderstand, both of my businesses still had many good loyal customers. Their products, for the most part, were good. The service they provided was good and relevant. Those were the reasons I bought them. Both businesses, in my opinion, were declining because their owners were either unable, for various reasons, to keep up with the changing structures and technologies in today’s business world. These were growth problems.
Just to clarify, growth is not always about making things bigger. Sometimes it’s a requirement just to keep things the same. For example, a business may be in a geographic area or a competitive market where there are only so many customers, and this is okay. But growing is still necessary to address natural attrition and keep the customer base large enough for the business to remain viable.
Even when I was working for someone, growth was no less important. I knew if I didn’t grow I could become irrelevant and easily replaceable. The best book I have ever read regarding this is Linchpin by Seth Godin.
This brings me back to purpose, if you have a purpose for doing what you do, I believe you will naturally want to learn and grow to satisfy that purpose. Your purpose could be as simple as providing for your family, or as difficult as providing clean drinking water for people that don’t have any. Both purposes changes the world for the better, today and tomorrow.
What to do? Are you continuing to grow, learning through curiosity and taking risks? Do you need some inspiration? Check out this video How ya gonna Live? Answer these questions, and the world will thank you!
