So, you’ve worked hard for several years now. You’ve built up your business from nothing, creating a company that rests firmly on the standards of low cost, quality…whatever. You saw an opportunity and you took advantage of it, and now you’ve got a great business at your command that’s…starting to lose revenue. What happened?
So often in business we see success as a goal, something to focus on and achieve. The question becomes, once we achieve it, now what? So you’re a big success, your company is well known and doing great, does that mean you keep doing what you’re doing? Absolutely not.
In business, it’s not a matter of not fixing what’s not broken, it’s a matter of continuing to move forward before something breaks. It’s easy for us to believe that once we’ve accomplished our goals it’s smooth sailing from here on out, but if your company doesn’t continue to innovate or moves away from the standards that made it a success in the first place, it can and will still fail.
Look at Microsoft for a moment. While I never liked IE, they found a way to make it the premiere browser worldwide, primarily by integrating it into their OS. Good move on their part, and they drove Netscape into obscurity. Then they got lazy, assuming that nobody could possibly intrude on their browser supremacy. Which is when Mozilla arrived on the scene with a quicker, more user-friendly, more adaptable browser and suddenly Microsoft had to scramble to catch up to features like tabbed browsing. Now Mozilla commands a quarter of the browsing market.
Worse than not innovating is allowing your quality to slip. This is a trend I see a lot in companies who feel that they’ve done so well and become such a widely recognized commodity that they feel they can start cutting corners and lose track of what made them a success in the first place. How many of my readers remember A&Ps? How about Woolworth’s? Anyone ever fly TWA or drive a Studebaker? For my younger readers, ever shopped at a Circuit City location? No matter how big and well known your company is, it can still go under.
On a recent trip to Savannah I passed by The Lady and Sons (celebrity chef Paula Dean’s first restaurant) and noticed the misters installed to keep lines of customers cool while waiting to be seated. I asked about it and was informed by my resident friend that while this famous place that was built from a bagged lunch business used to be excellent, since Deen abandoned watching the day-to-day operations, the food and service quality have gone way down hill, and they basically survive on the publicity garnered by their famous owner. So much so that employees have to learn more about the face of the restaurant than the food served there.
There’s nothing saying that if you build an enterprise from scratch or even build it up from where you got it that you don’t deserve to enjoy your success, but if you feel that success means no longer running your business or trying to improve it (without over-extending yourself, but that’s another article), then it’s time to sell the business or pass it along to somebody who will continue to grow it while you happily relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
