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Why wait until the pain is unbearable?
Last week I attended a seminar about sales techniques. It provided an interesting perspective on why people buy from salespersons and underscored what I've been observing about all sorts of choices we make - as individuals and as companies. The seminar leader, a respected trainer of sales people with a fantastic track record told us that we wait until we are experiencing pain before we will buy. As sales people we must identify the customers' pain and show them how our product or service will deal with it - take the pain away. If we do that we get the sale. It's simple enough and it works.
Of course in some cases we can take our own pain away, in others, we can't so in those cases we get help - we buy from that salesperson.
Here is a simple example from my own life. Earlier today I was getting ready to go out and realized that I had a sore toe. One of the nails of another toe was digging into the side of sore one, causing the pain. I cut the nails and was fine. But why did I wait until then to cut them? It would be so easy to simply cut them regularly (on a schedule) and avoid the small pain that I felt. In that case I didn't need a fancy solution that someone else provided at a cost.
Sure, that's a trivial example, but it helped me realize that as much as I talk about being proactive, I still very often wait until the pain becomes unbearable before I make a change. Sometimes I can fix it myself and sometimes I need help.
Of course our businesses are extensions of ourselves, so what we do in our own lives we often take to work with us and do there too. At work we also very often wait until the pain (in whatever form it takes) becomes unbearable before we make a change. Sometimes we can fix it ourselves and sometimes we need help.
We don't do enough proactive maintenance and tolerate the pain of excessive downtime and lost production. When markets get tough or our plants are threatened with closure we seek solutions to increase uptime. We "discover" all these cool proactive techniques that have, in reality, been there all along - we just choose to use them. Often we need help to set them up, supply us the technology, implement the computer system, etc. Sometimes it works and sometimes we're too late - we let the pain go on too long.
One client recently discovered that it pays to be proactive about determining the optimum age for replacement of fleet assets. This applies to any assets, but in this case it was a large fleet of municipal vehicles: trucks, cars, snow plows, sewer drain cleaners, busses, ambulances, fire trucks, etc. They had historically let the vehicles age until they were very expensive to maintain before they would replace them. Usually a major breakdown where an expensive repair was needed would trigger retirement of the vehicle - an engine or transmission replacement for example. When they looked at annual maintenance costs for the fleet they could identify an age at which the average annual cost was minimized. The curve was U-shaped and that age is at the bottom of the "U". In almost all cases, that age was much younger than the age of their fleet assets. They were therefore operating an expensive old fleet. They had waited too long and pain was becoming unbearable - they could no longer get the maintenance budgets they needed from their municipial masters.
Other clients in the electric utilities industry are just now learning what it takes to wrestle with this same sort of problem for their aging infrastructure assets.
How many are wrestling with shortages of skilled labor? Are you looking ahead a few years and seeing a large number of baby-boomers retiring? Have you figured out how to replace them? Are you counting on an educational system that is still geared to churning out high tech, but few skilled techs? Are you recruiting, hiring and training your own apprentices? Are you looking for talent in your local area or further afield? Are you capturing the know how of those who will retire? Are you looking for ways to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done so you can use fewer people? Those methods exist - do you know what they are? If so, are you using them yet?
All those steps are painful in their own right, but they are less painful than the pain you'll feel if you wait too long. And those questions only apply to one potential problem or "pain point" that your business is facing. There are many others. What about replacement decisions for aging and unreliable assets? What about investment in predictive technologies? What about training programs that enhance the workforce in general? What about tapping into the creative talents of your employees? What about getting the value that you still haven't realized on that computer system you implemented a year ago? And so on... How long will you wait?
Until the pain is unbearable. Until there is a crisis. Solutions that arise to help you when you are in pain are always more expensive than the solutions you can apply today. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
Most businesses today are very focused on short-term profits. The solutions to tomorrow's problems are seen as avoidable costs today. And why not? The manager who will really need to deal with them head on is probably your successsor. That mentality is equivalent to burying your head in the sand and hoping the problem will disappear. It won't, but your bonus will probably reflect the short term gains you make by ignoring tomorrow's problems.
We help our clients see these problems for what they are and we suggest possible solutions, but the choice is always the client's. If they choose short over long term gain they will ignore us and choose to continue as they are - essentially doing nothing, or at most they will do the least they can so that they appear to be dealing with the problem. That looks good - it's visionary! It's amazing how we can fool ourselves too, but that's another blog entry.
All the best to you all.
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