business
Twice today, within the span of 15 minutes, I saw two references about why ships float or sink made in two very different places by two very different people.
One quote posted was this “Ships don’t sink because of the water AROUND them. Ships sink because of the water that gets IN them. Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.”
One of those “hmmm” moments followed shortly thereafter.
An old saying is “You have to sink or swim”. I am re-aligning some things in my personal and professional life particularly during the last few weeks in anticipation of some BIG changes that may/may not come by the end of this calendar year. I have found myself often anxious, fearful, hyper-motivated, tired, revved up and done…often all at the same time.
You know how it is. You look around at others and what they are doing. Then you look down at little ole you, and anxiety sets in because those two don’t match at all. You second guess, you wonder what you are doing wrong, you start pondering how to swim harder and longer, adding more to your schedule and an already crowded life.
So you add…and add again. And nothing seems to help. In fact, it seems to get worse. You start taking on water. Fast.
Epiphany happens, if you are lucky, and you realize staying afloat and positioned properly is not about swimming, it is about shifting. Shifting your mindset, shifting your focus, evaluating where you were and where you wish to go, weighing the value of people, their contributions, you and your contributions to both your life and your business…and then…you allow some people, things, beliefs to shift back into their proper perspective.
And suddenly, the ship starts to float again….and so do you.
They: Did you hear so and so is doing xxx at their shop/in their estate company now? (at one time you could insert “cleaning company” for the words shop/estate company since I owned a cleaning company for many years)
Me: Oh? That’s interesting.
They: It’s amazing how much business/customers/inventory they are doing/servicing/selling.
Me: That’s great, they do a lot of business, I have heard that about them/seen that.
They: Have you thought about changing and doing a/b/c too? If it works for them it will work for you, don’t you think you should do that too?
Me: I will look into that.
I had the following article hit my inbox today….and it speaks to me. This is so the way I have always tried to run my companies. I have always said my best competition is myself, period. I don’t look around too much to see what others are doing and trying to mimic their choices and attain their results. I am interested, yes. I am educating myself on different ways of doing things, yes. But to become them? No…I can’t be different if I am the same. That is a pretty simple concept….one that other business owners often fail to embrace and be ok with and thrive on. That’s why I will listen when others tell me this and that company is doing such and thus, but I don’t let it deter me from my steady course. I have a path, I stick to it till I know I should veer off because MY business tells me to do so. What happens most often if you (I) run after those competitive rabbits is this…you spend your money and time chasing THEIR ideals and dreams, and not your own. Sometimes the best plan is just to stay the course, and nod your head a lot and smile. And a well-timed, “hmmm, interesting” doesn’t hurt either.
Yesterday ended the first official week of my retirement from the cleaning industry. It also marked my first official week of entry into the estate service industry. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about both of those facts. I had entered the cleaning industry full time over twelve years ago with the intention of being there forever, contributing and consulting, making money and spreading happiness and joy in people’s homes and businesses simply by giving them a clean place to “do life”. I envisioned my company large, even maybe franchising it, and I set about tooling systems and procedures and policies to support that big vision. And you know…I was successful at it, or so I thought, for a good deal of that twelve years. What began as a way to make a living became a life, and I had convinced myself that this life was what I wanted. But while I was enabling another person or family to live a good clean, simple happy life through my services and efforts, I was slowly but surely exchanging my own life and true happiness for big time worry in the process.
About three years ago, my cleaning company was at the peak of productivity and I had finally brought it to the brink of scaling to the next level. Discussions with a few people about franchising or at the very least opening another location in one of the nearby cities had taken place. There were 12 cleaning techs on staff, an operations manager, route manager, supply manager, and I had even added a personal assistant to aid in some HR issues and also schedule my company events and handle many of my personal needs to free up my own time. I was living it all in high cotton, or so I thought.
Then the page turned.
Over the next three years, my company experienced extreme crashing and burning in regards to the staffing which coincided with the same type crashing and burning in my customer base. This was very unexpected and hit me broadside. We were servicing almost 200 regular residential accounts a month (many of those getting cleaned multiple times in a month), 10 commercial accounts, scads of move in/move out and other add-on cleanings, and I was nearing an amount of revenue I had only dreamed about when I opened the doors. We were listed among the top two cleaning companies in the Tri-State area and it had become almost a formality to go out and bid the jobs because we had a closing rate of near 100% of anything we bid due to our reputation in the area. People were on a waiting list to get serviced. But….my staff was feeling like workhorses rather than thoroughbreds. At the same time the big economy crash came along and stressed our customers to the point of cutting back services. And still I plowed on not seeing that the reduction of customers was affecting my staff and they were growing restless in their daily work because they were feeling personal strain and insecurity in a company that seemed to be losing its market share. I proceeded with the idea that we just needed to add back in more customers, market and advertise more, take on the work that we would have refused in the past because it hadn’t fit our criterion of cleaning, and just move forward with my big vision. My mantra became “Trust me, I know what’s best for you.” Funny thing is, when the staff began quitting, and the customers starting cancelling services altogether, they were saying the same thing to me by their actions. I realize that now….and I also realize they were right, they did know best.
In my motivation to make it all work, to BE what I had created, I began to lose the essence of why I was there in the first place…to make life simple and better for a person and a family. And ultimately I was the one suffering the most in those areas. I had forgotten two very essential ingredients of success….caring for others begins with self-love, and self-love cannot be rushed.
How many of us work the plan only to find out we didn’t include our passions and dreams at all in that plan? How many times, in our attempt to do for another, do we throw our own needs and wants to the curb and think we will find self-fulfillment in something or someone else? We work to eat, buy things, gain fame or recognition, but we are building a life that is not sustainable really because it isn’t nourishing those real loves of our own life. We gauge our success on a bank account or how many people are working for us, titles we affix to those people or whether we have to check the bank account daily to make sure we have money for the house note. Or we base our contentment and our value on what we see reflected in another person when we are in a relationship, be it friendship or more. Then those things start falling away and not working, but we don’t see it right away. Our internal voice begins to shout to get our attention but we cannot hear it over our own voice screaming at others “Trust me, I know what’s best for you.” Rather than walk at a steady pace, we begin to trot a little and over time we pick up our gait because we finally feel something is not working and it must be because I am not running fast enough or not doing “something”. When we walk through life, we can see everything….the leaves on the trees, the flowers by the road, ants and spiders…but when we run, all we can see is a blur of these things. We know they are there, but we cannot experience them. And if there is danger or anything that needs to be changed or maybe even dismissed from our life, we miss it because we are running so hard. It’s difficult and nigh on to impossible to change your path or adjust course quickly if you are running rather than walking. And even worse, we cannot see the ruts and holes and we end up flinging ourselves headlong into a place we were never meant to be. We lie there, the dust settles and we think “What just happened?”
Life just did you a favor, my friend.
At this point, we either lie face down in the dirt or we get up and start walking again. In my case, I still had worry inside and unfortunately I wasn’t ready to get up right away. I laid there, cried and ranted, beat the ground with my fists, shouted out for help…but there seemed to be no one there to hear me. Epiphanies happen when you are lying there, if you let them happen. And I thank God mine did.
I realized I was running and fighting for something I really didn’t even want anymore. I wasn’t being nourished, my creativity had been relegated to the side of the road and I passed it every so often, but had not given in to stopping and pursuing that creativity in years. Happiness had been replaced by the worries of the day, and I dreaded getting up in the morning rather than looking at each day as a clean palette. I laid there in the dirt and remembered…I love to paint, to shop in thrift stores, make wreathes and beautiful things from nature, decorate my home, spend time with my family…where had all that gone?
Today I am at the beginning of the path once again, but this path is leading toward the things I love and starting at the right place…me. It sure is a lot better being “poor” in the bank account, not knowing whether the bills are going to get paid by a business you love, rather than for sure paid by a business you have grown cold in. And I am like a cold pig in warm slop…I love finding vintage items for my home and it is starting to look lived in again. I have started decorating and painting and even singing again and playing music while I work. I am gaining customers that have a love and common interest in the old and discarded, rusty and crusty junk that I do…and they see the same value in it. This is making all the difference to me. I have found my peeps! But more importantly, I have found me again.
Bob Marley was known for much, but his songs always spoke of the freedom and ease of life for someone who lives the moments and doesn’t worry too much about the days. I really don’t know if the type business I am enjoying now is going to “make it” or not…but I plan to gather the joy in this moment while I can, and just worry about those “do I stay or do I go” decisions when the time comes. But the day for my pursuit of happiness is now….and that is one thing I am not just not worried about anymore.
I am one of the unfortunate sufferers of arthritis and osteoporosis. The effects of both these conditions have pretty much been a part of my life in one way or other since my late teens, early 20’s. At first, my parents thought it was traditional “growing pains”, so we pretty much ignored it as such and went on. But as I left my teens and entered my 20’s I started having some really odd pains…most mornings it was hard to get out of bed.
I found I couldn’t do the common things of a 20 year old…it was an effort to pick up my baby, my hands would “give out”, or my upper arms some mornings had virtually no strength in them, seemingly overnight. My feet had what I called heel spurs, but looking back I can see it was where the osteoporosis had set in. Not the normal physical life of a 20 year old. I plodded through it and played more with my daughter on the more mobile days, and cut back activity on others when we sat and read a lot or watched the tube, due to my aching joints and bones. But once I entered the 30’s, the pain had become debilitating more days than not, so off I trotted to the doctor, and thus the diagnosis all those years ago.
Several different medicines have been tried, but not being much for synthetic answers, I pretty much have just “adjusted” to the pain and difficulty in my body as the years have rolled on. Now at the age of “over 50”, there is pain every day, all day, in more than one spot of my body and that is my norm. Frankly most of the time I push through it and don’t even really notice it until it gets outside the pain level I have grown accustomed to all these years.
This week, I decided to change my daily routine. I had begun working at home the last couple of months pretty much exclusively and although I am a very organized person, I kept finding myself kind of drifting from one activity to another during the day and not getting as much accomplished as I desired and knew I could complete. I also seemed to be running out of time to just be myself and do some personal things I love such as read the Kindle on the back deck. So I sat down with pencil and paper, jotted down a tentative scheduling of my time and necessary daily activities, and placed those in general slots of time during the day. I wanted to create a new “normal” schedule for myself since the “normal” I have had for many years was no longer existent when I came back home to work, rather than going to an office every day.
All week, I have been on schedule and now that it is Friday it is actually starting to kind of feel “normal”. I marvel over the things I am accomplishing. I am marveling more over being able to stop at a certain time of the day, just like in an office setting, and fix my dinner, watch TV, read, rest or whatever I want to do for a slot of hours in my evening, rather than working till bedtime because I took 5 minutes here and 15 there during the day and “got behind” on things I really needed to complete for the day trying to grab moments of personal time of reflection and rest. I am more focused, I am more energized, and even my body is responding by getting more physical rest in longer segments, which could do nothing but aid in my health issues, right?
What I have found most interesting is this…
I have spent years working in my business. Many hours were willingly put in and very much enjoyed because the business was growing and so was I. I was meeting new people, being recognized in my community and among my peers, becoming a spokesperson for my industry. My new “normal” was getting up, working till bed with a few moments sprinkled through the day here and there of personal or family time, and doing it all over the next day. Prior to this working career, I had been a stay-at-home mom that worked at home, was in my yard and gardens for about 30 hours a week ( my passion), worked in my church, cooked every day, made bread, and did all those things that I adored doing for my family. A sad divorce forced me into the work world, and I adapted to it quickly and loved it, too…but the things that were once “normal” for me became the “abnormal”, and stayed that way for many years.
When I got up this morning at 6, I started thinking about my life now, and what my “normal” is now…and more what my “normal” today should be. As I took my morning walk, I thought about how my joint pain over the years had grown to a point that what was once thought of as terribly paralyzing “growing pains”, were tiny compared to the pain I now feel in my body as the norm each day. It truly does paralyze me in many ways and make me incapable of living a “normal” life for my age. I had let pain and difficulty physically become my “normal”. Nowadays, some pretty severe pain has to come along to slap me and say “hey you, you have some real physical issues here that need to be addressed. This isn’t just something you have to go through…a “growing pain”…it is out of the NORMAL…do something about it”.
How many of us, I wonder, have let sad situations, people who are jerks that consistently disrespect us by their words or behavior, or personal hardship and fear become our “normal” because it was looked upon as a “growing pain”…just something you have to go through, everyone does… it is “normal”…
Maybe it’s time for each of us to take a good long look at the life we lead, who we allow into it, what activities and priorities are part of the DNA of our today. Have we allowed people, emotions, beliefs or any number of “abnormal” things become our “normal” through disregard of the pain they may be causing us, and have caused us over the years? Is it time for us to change our perception? Or, even more… is it time to take a look at our pain head on, decide what has taken the value of our life and turned it into a devaluing thing…and then make a shift back to our kind of “normal”?
It might be that going back to our “normal” is the real growing pain we need to experience today.
The office buzzed with the voices of many visitors today. Our company was host to a “Grow Your Business” workshop, and the staff room was full of eager business owners all morning. Business coach, Robert Staub, introduced several business tools during his presentation, and many of us were excited about implementing new ideas in our customer relationships. One of the tools he touched on was completing 2-3 HVA’s a day….High Value Activities.
These are activities that end with measurable results, such as working on your website for 1 hour or making 3 phone calls on your prospect list. These are vital to a business owner that is serious about his company and its growth, because they are activities that add value to an already cherished investment.
More work followed at the office, then I scooted out to a bid and secured a new customer, ending the work day on a high note. Afterwards, I pulled up to my favorite neighborhood Mexican restaurant to have a nice dinner, relax and read a bit, and then head home. The restaurant was busy with activity…unusual for a Wednesday night.I was greeted by name at the door ( yeah, I go there a lot) and seated in my usual place out of the way of most foot traffic.
The waiter came back to the table with my order (yeah he knew what I usually order on my “reading” nights), and turned and left. I paid little attention since I was engrossed in my book, but when I looked up a few minutes later I noticed there was a small bowl of cheese dip and nothing else on the table….no chips, no complimentary salsa, no drink. Odd…but I waited for him to bring the rest of my order. Waitresses and waiters, including mine, scurried back and forth, continually passing my table, even looking my way and smiling, but never coming over to see if I needed anything, and looking away too quickly for me to get their attention. There was a table full of giggling teens across from me and each time the staff passed them the table got some kind of acknowledgment, a questioning after their needs, some kind of service. Further up from me, there was a young family that flagged the waitresses several times for napkins ( young kids), more drinks, replacement forks for those that found their way to the floor. Other tables were serviced well and often, and I waited, feeling totally forgotten after a period of time. Finally a waiter from another section of the restaurant passed my table as I looked up, I suppose, with a expression as if I had been abandoned by my peeps. He came over to me, and took a look at the table confused. “They have brought you no chips, and no drink?” I answered that they had not, and he said he would investigate the problem, walking away saying something under his breath in Spanish. By this time, I had been seated almost 20 minutes. Under normal circumstances, I would have made more of an issue, or at most left the restaurant and found another place to eat. But I knew this was the last night this restaurant would be open, and I wanted to eat there one last time. I knew the good service they had given in the past, the way I was made to feel important and valued, so the little annoyances this night were not immediately recognized. I was hoping to get what I had come to expect, and what I hoped for, and the promise I had been given on the first night I had joined the customer relationship with this little place. So I willingly waited for the issues to get solved, and the staff to get on track and give me again what they had promised when I walked through their door the first time.
As several minutes passed and there was no sign of my savior, and others continued to dismiss me, I began to have some odd feelings rise up in myself. I began to feel not only dismissed, but abandoned, and after a bit more time passed the abandonment turned into a feeling of devaluing and more than a small case of anger. All the past good history here was beginning to vanish in my mind as I started that head talk we all do….”why can’t they see me? Did I give them too difficult an order to fill? I did make it clear to them didn’t I? I mean, they did know for sure what I ordered,…well, yeah they had to, because they had asked ‘The usual?’ and I had said yes”…and on and on. Dumb stuff, but real.
The waiter came back with chips (keep in mind not MY waiter) and apologizes saying ” We have no salsa left, and the frozen drink machine is broken ma’am, can I get you something else?” I could tell by the look on his face, this was not a recent development…when I walked through the front door, there was no salsa and the frozen drink machine was broken…and they all knew what I was going to want. I was going to want ‘the usual”. And that was what they usually promised. But no one told me they could not deliver that this night, hoping I would just accept whatever they had to offer me. I was really miffed now. Why didn’t they just own up they did not have what I would expect, what had been promised before on every other visit, and give me the option to go elsewhere to get what I needed and wanted? I felt oddly used.
I told him to get my waiter to bring me a diet coke.
Another 30 minutes passed, and I realized that although I was a valued customer in my own perception, I was starting to doubt my value to the wait staff. I was becoming part of the scenery, blending into the background, and was being taken for granted. I also knew if I was going to get any service at all, the service that I was promised, had come to expect and deserved, I would have to get someone’s attention somehow. By this time I was pretty insulted by their treatment and lack of interest after my needs. So, I slowly closed my book, put my purse on my arm, got out of my seat and just stood by my booth and waited for someone to notice me.
Almost immediately three of the wait staff came from their respective corners, asking after my needs, flying back to the kitchen, and within 3 minutes I had substitute items brought to me in an attempt to restore my relationship with them. I ate dinner, finished a chapter of my book, paid my bill without a tip, and left the restaurant for the last time. The good feelings about the little place faded very quickly…I received a half-hearted attempt to fulfill their original promise to me as a customer, and this will be the memory I leave them with…non-stellar and forgettable.
I thought about this on the way home as I passed through my dark, quiet neighborhood. I was still having a hard time shaking the feelings of neglect and dismissal by people I barely knew…but why? I suddenly remembered a Bible verse in James that says “if you see a sister or brother that is poor and lacking in daily food and we say to them ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled’, then what good is that?”
And my thoughts went further…
How many times do we pass by those we know are in need for the most basic of life’s promises…shelter, food, clothing…and we divert our eyes, or hope someone else will answer their plea? How many people in our close circle of relationships did we make promises to long ago but somehow let those go by the wayside? We promised to love, cherish, care for them…but now we admonish them to “be warmed and filled” as we pass them by and dismiss their need for help because we are drowning in our own consuming issues? How many in our world go unnoticed, untouched, unloved, and unimportant to someone until they stand and say ” I will be ignored no longer”? And why does it take others, like the waiter that took care of my needs…. to notice, come alongside, embrace and value those that we should be rushing to heal, nurture and care for first? Or why do we take care of those who give us the most pay off, or make us look the best, but tell those closest to us to care for their own needs…and be filled?
We easily forget it is our privilege to serve those we love or see in need, but it is also a mandate. The empty cannot just go and be filled with food, or love, or value, or appreciation. Those in our circle become our HVA’s, in a way. When we highly value another, we give them the promise of rest, they know they are cherished, and the relationship we have will grow as we invest ourselves in others. Those in need should never have to stand up to our poor treatment for us to notice them…we should count it our privilege to come alongside and serve without being asked, as we place their interests above our own. And I can only imagine there will be many measurable results to follow, and all will be stellar and remembered as the relationships grow and are cherished by our simple acts.