When doing nothing costs you more
I don’t mind making mistakes, because it means you tried something. What bothers me is when people let others decide for them, or when you choose to let opportunities pass you by without actually making the decision to pass on them. It’s OK to say No to opportunities, even good ones, when the timing isn’t right. But it’s not OK (or at least shouldn’t be) to not speak up and say that an opportunity isn’t right, or that you’re actively going to pass.
Listen to this new, 9-minute episode for perspective on when you might be letting others control your success.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com
– When doing nothing costs you more. Listen to this episode, see where I’m going with this one. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast.” I was thinking about this with some of my clients and some of the presentations I’ve been doing lately. And there are some people that are very, very proactive, they’re making decisions, they’re running through walls, they’re doing all that kind of stuff. And then there are people that are sitting back and analyzing and trying to agonize over decisions. And I’ve spoken about this in terms of perfection and other things like that. But I wanted to kind of bring a little different angle on this one.
The most important thing when presented with an opportunity is to make a decision. The decision can be not to go forward with the opportunity, and that’s fine, that is a decision. It’s when you don’t decide and you miss out on an opportunity, that’s when it’s a little bit harder for you to feel the loss, you realize the opportunity cost, what you don’t get because you just didn’t choose to decide. And for me, it’s always, why did you let somebody else make that decision? It’s okay to say no, I’ve done other episodes on this. Did one recently about when is it better to just not do it? When is it better to just turn the lights off and say, we’re not working that day. It’s okay, let’s give our our team a rest.
But the whole idea of not deciding, choosing not to decide, I don’t even know that you chose not to decide, you just put it off, put it off, put it off, and what are you afraid of? Now, there are times when we just don’t want to let somebody down, we have other people counting on us and stuff like that but we also need to give them some closure, even if they’re going to be upset with it, we need to give them closure. I’ve had times where people want to do business with me in a certain way or certain partnerships or things, and I’m interested, and I’m just not dedicating the time to it that it needs. And I have to go back and I have to say, listen, you know what? This is a good idea. I just can’t give it my time now. And I know that they’re upset ’cause they want to move forward, and they think it would be a great partnership and all. But I also have to decide that I can’t do it all and I have to cut some things off.
If you’ve never read Mike Michalowicz’s book, “The Pumpkin Plan,” I recommend that you read that. If you haven’t read his “Profit First,” of course, you want to read that book “Profit First,”, but “The Pumpkin Plan” where he talks about how they grow the giant pumpkins for the state fair. And you start off with all of these pumpkins growing on the vine and you cut off the little ones to give all the nutrients to the big ones until you’re left with one or two humongous ones. And it’s the same with our businesses. There are times when we’re better off putting our efforts into stuff, even though there might be fruits of our labor somewhere else, it’s better off doing it. But the key is did you make the decision? Did you take the steps necessary to say yes or to say no or to push it down the road but to a specific time so that you’re going to get to it ’cause you really want to get to it? Or are you just letting other people make that decision for you? When does it cost you more to not decide? You can decide not to spend the money on a new website, and anybody that you’re losing right now, you’ll continue to lose them.
The thing is, you don’t see that, you don’t see that loss. If you could see the people that came to your website, didn’t like it and left, never contacted you, and how much money that could have cost you, or did cost you, I should say, but you could have made but you didn’t, opportunity cost again, you’d probably act faster on building the new site you need. If people are coming to your site and they’re converting and you’re not losing people, then you’re good, you don’t need that. But there are certain things that we choose not to or we put off those decisions, and they’re costing us more but we can’t see them and that’s that whole thing, we can’t see that. Like you go to a store, and they’ve cut their hours because they’re short on staff and you show up at nine o’clock in the morning, and they don’t open until 10, so you go someplace else. Unless they have a camera outside, they don’t know that that has happened. And if they saw it enough at nine, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45, maybe, maybe they’d open earlier because they’d realize that that would pay for those extra people. Or if they had to pay their people more, it would pay for it because you’re losing business every time. And I think I’ve had that where I’ve tried to go to a restaurant for lunch, they’re closed now because they’re short on staff. I’m sure they would love to be open if they had the staff, but that’s a conscious decision on their part.
I remember seeing one time, somebody’s telling me a story, it was 15 minutes before opening at a coffee shop, I might have mentioned this story already, 15 minutes before opening at a coffee shop. And people are lined up outside, and the people inside are getting themselves ready there, and they’re not opening the door until that hour on the dot that they’re supposed to open. And I know if that was not a chain, if it was a small, locally owned shop, the people that I know who are in business like that, would open the door 15 minutes early, 20 minutes early, a half an hour early, when there are people lined up outside and you might say to them, “Hey listen the coffee’s still brewing here, give us another five minutes.” But you see the need and you follow the need there, especially in that case, people were in the store, and these people are lined up outside the store. Like, don’t you see that? I’ve had friends tell me about, they go to a restaurant and you see that the section is empty and they’re trying to balance the wait staff or whatever. And I get that. But somebody says, “Hey, can we sit over there?” And they like, “No, that section is closed.” Okay.
A friend of mine actually talked about that in his book, David Avron talked about that in his latest book, about how they had all these people and they wouldn’t let them move the tables together. And they said, “we’ll pull ’em apart when we’re done,” but move the tables together, ’cause they all wanted to sit together, and they wouldn’t let them do it. I did another episode on that with rules. So when is it costing you more because you don’t make a decision, because you decide not to move forward with whatever that is, you decide not to move forward with the new pricing structure, not to move forward with the new marketing pieces, not to move forward with hiring that person or hiring a virtual assistant or outsourcing something that’s not getting done, either at all or well within your company and not doing it, what is it costing you? What is that opportunity cost? And so the next time you’re presented with something that you have to make a decision on, make the decision. I just showed this a slide the other day in one of my presentations I think it was William Greenblatt, I think was his name, he said, “I’ve never made a bad decision, I’ve just had bad results.” And that’s the key. Make the decision, what’s the worst that could happen?
Another episode that I did, it’s probably not that bad, but what bothers me is when I see people either letting someone else make the decision for them, ’cause they don’t want to be accountable for that decision, or just keep kicking the can down the road instead of just saying, you know what, I’m never going to get to that, admitting I’m never going to get to that. If you’ve heard the episode I did on this or I also wrote about it in your “Attitude for Success,” about how I only have three major things, up to three major things I should say, on my big to-do list at any one time because I can’t do everything.
So I focus on those things, giving up other opportunities, because the ones I’m working on will never get done if I have 20 things on my list. So I cut it to three. So every day I do French lessons, working on that, and every day, not every day, but I’m working on my next book and that’s a focus on that. Those are the two big things that, maybe besides my health, those are the things that are on my list, when they come off the list, I have plenty of things to fill that, I’m just not giving them any of my time, because I don’t want to dilute what I’m doing to do that. It would be easy to do that and like I said, I’ve recently had to say to people, you know what, this sounds really good, I can’t focus on that now, I can’t give it and you the attention that I need to. So I’m going to pass on that consciously, I’m not going to let it pass me by, because I refuse to make a decision one way or another. ‘Cause even letting other people decide is kind of making a decision. But how do you own the successes if you’re not willing to own those decisions? That’s kind of my thought. So a little bit of a, I don’t know, maybe today was a soapbox, not sure, but let me know what you think.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
©2023 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com
