Success Is Not About What Is, It Is About What Isn't.

His Daughter Helps Him Run The Mechanic Shop

I was talking to a mechanic yesterday.  He has operated his own auto mechanic shop for almost 35 years.  He has a few nice toys he has acquired in his life.  One of them is a very nice 40 foot boat, a river cruiser for pleasure.  He also owns some old classic Harley's.  One is reportedly worth over $50,000.  He said he noticed years ago that his business began to do a lot better when he did not offend the people who came into his shop for mechanical help.  He said he noticed that most mechanics had a tendency to talk 'over' the customer about the auto problems they brought in.  He said he used to do the same thing to the customers coming in for the first time.  They would come in with the problem they were having with their vehicle and he would try to show them how smart he was about being able to fix what was wrong.  In the process to gain the customers trust about who was the 'right' mechanic to select, he found himself talking 'over' them instead of 'with' them.  He said early on in his business career he recognized what kind of mechanic he needed to learn how not to be.  He said a good deal of his success can be linked to what he isn't instead of what he is.  It made a lot of sense.

He also said the next step he had to overcome was to avoid becoming labelled as a mechanic shop that kept your vehicle longer than the customer felt it should be out of service.  He knew he could not become known as a procrastinator and keep the customers vehicles longer than the customer felt it should take.  He said his mechanic shop was not known for taking in vehicles and keeping them for a long time.  He wasn't known for being a procrastinator.

Before we left that conversation, he described how this current mess with our economy reminds him a lot of what it was like in the early 80's.  He remembers how busy he became during the recession of the 80's because nobody could afford to buy as many new vehicles so they began increasing the repairs they needed to do on the current vehicles they owned.  Older vehicles needed to keep running instead of becoming trade-ins for newer purchases.  His business boomed during that recession.  Sometimes success is not what is, but instead, adapting to what isn't.  He said he noticed how this was a true statement in his business model.  As a result, he said he spends a lot of time trying to figure out what isn't happening in his marketplace so he can make sure it is.  He said he thinks a lot of his success comes from this line of thinking.  He said he thinks about the stuff that is not happening more than the things that are.  What isn't became bigger to him than the things that were.  His success is not about what is, it was more about what isn't.  He said nobody brings a vehicle to him that is.  They all bring vehicles to me that are not.  He said his business was a success because he fully understood what isn't.

Think about it for a very long time, people.  Go deeper into this line of thought.  It reveals a deeper understanding for how business can and does succeed.

He is dead spot on.  His mechanic shop gained its best growth when the customers could not get their vehicles to move correctly, and even more so when they could not afford to replace them.  If the customers vehicles do not move correctly, consistently, and with ease, they are not doing what the customers need them to be doing.  If the vehicle is moving well, he has no business.  If the vehicle isn't, his business has more chances to grow.  Isn't, feeds his business growth.  He became more in-tune to the thinking of what isn't.

Fifteen years ago I came across a great motivational tape.  It was a training cassette.  It began its introduction with a quick but powerful opening line.  The speaker on the cassette described how he paid more attention in his finance career to the corollaries of life than he did to those things that matched up well.  Corollaries are the opposite consequences that occur, not the cause nor the effects of what did happen.  The consequences of what 'did not happen' became how he looked at his financial advisory work.  He would spend more time working on the things that did not happen as opposed to the things that did.  He used the cassette to motivate people to become more 'in-tune' to the depths of how the business of their personal finances did not work well.  He focused on the corollary.  On that motivational tape, he claimed his success came from that particular view.  Looking at the corollary was the key to his success.  I noticed the mechanic was describing the same thing.

Study The Simplicity In The Opposites

Let's look at some examples.

On yesterdays post we sniffed over the recent success of Targets new product introduction.  If these two business owners, the mechanic and the financial adviser, were to evaluate Targets recent product introduction success they would take a closer look at what did not happen, instead of what did happen.  If this is true, what would they examine first?

What kinds of corollaries would they force themselves to examine?  Think about it.

They might ask these questions.  Why did nobody else, the competition, experience this flood of consumer rush?  What didn't the others do?  Why did Target run out of this product so fast?  Why did Target not be able to fill all of the customer orders?  How did Target decide which customer to call to let them know why they would not be getting the product they ordered because it was no longer available?  Why did the supplier who made the product not be able to make more?  How did the increased demand for the product fail to be met?  Why did the marketing team miss how successful this new introduction would be?  If the product sold out so quickly, was there enough original stock supplied to meet a national advertising demand?  If not, why not?  Was this campaign really a scheme to gain national news for the benefit of Targets marketing attention?  Was the website used to manage the online orders big enough in server design to handle a national campaign?

Corollaries tell separate stories of the same event.  Learning how to manage corollaries is a good practice that requires deeper thoughts of evaluation.  Looking at an event in business with the corollary eye can help to reveal some interesting perspectives.  Learn how to examine your business model from the corollary eye.  Be able to accept some things as they are not, as much as you accept them for what they are.  Sometimes success is not about what is.  Sometimes success is about what isn't.

If, for example, Target did not purchase near enough product to support a normal national advertising campaign they would find a 'sell out' very probable.  What if their server failed during that campaign from natural electronic or equipment causes?  Would the timing be a great opportunity to capture national news?  We are living in some very tough times.  Most big organizations are running lean on inventory purchases.  I suspect Target is no exception.  My computer servers fail quite often, in my little business models.  I do not need to have a high level of overwhelming 'hits' to cause my server to go down.  Equipment failure happens.  Buying departments run lean.  They have strapped budgets.  Target is no exception.  These three business problems could have coincidentally happened at the same time.  One, a short supply of new products on hand at Target Stores, two, a 'close-out' purchase from a supplier source and, three, a mechanical break-down of a national computer server at the same time.  If these anomalies are true, the corollary thoughts have just helped us to discover how to make the best marketing recovery to a very troubling series of business mistakes.

Bill Gates has a very good book worth reading.  It is, "Business At The Speed Of Thought."   In that book he describes how a successful business owner needs to learn how to turn bad news into good news.  From the corollary view of things, maybe Target did just that.  I do not truly know.  However, I think it is an event that can help every business owner learn how to examine how to use the corollaries from the travels on their business trail.  Thinking about what business isn't can be a very useful way to examine what needs to be done next.  I have found many success stories in my business travels that came form the perspective of what wasn't happening, instead of what was happening.  Success is not always about what is happening.  Most of the best business success comes from the examination of what is not happening.  Success is about what isn't.

Until next time...