Gaps In Your Vision
When I was running my company and trying to continue a growth & profitability trajectory, I had been attending some different peer groups. I'll go into the value of those groups in a separate post (they are SUPER valuable), but one thing I learned pretty quickly is lots of folks running companies have very similar problems, but they often look at them, or their solutions differently. It made me realize that having some perspective, different viewpoints, and alternate thinking to essentially the same set of facts became invaluable very quickly.
At that point I decided I needed to hire a business coach / consultant for myself to dig into some of these elements where I was struggling, or at least felt uncomfortable. The whole reason I am in this same business now is simply because of how much I learned and grew (and the company followed suit) by asking someone to help look at some of these problems and offer some perspective for me.
I look at it like this: CEOs, Entrepreneurs, owners/operators all have a ton of experience in their business and/or craft. They have seen hundreds or thousands of scenarios and know them like the back of their hand. All the wisdom that comes from that experience also creates what I refer to as "Gaps" in our vision. Some people call it blinders or tunnel vision, but I look at it differently. We have most of the sightlines, see pretty well, and have done well to this point, but there are simply elements we don’t see because we haven't been exposed to that way of looking at a particular problem or set of data. We fall into a pattern that we cannot visualize differently because of how many repetitions we have experienced.
I like to think we all need someone every now and then to shine some light into those gaps for us so we can take a closer look to see if there's something missing or a better way to approach a particular element of our business. Even if I saw 90%, the 10% I was exposed to was tremendous in pushing my success over the hump and onto the next set of challenges.
I often think we get stuck when we can't see properly, and the path forward becomes more of a habit than clear vision and direction. So, for those of you own own/run businesses, I encourage you to seek out people to discuss the specifics of your business, the numbers, problems, team, anything you currently see as a challenge and get some additional perspective or confirmation on it. If you ask other people who have been in your shoes you will absolutely get some alternative thinking. Often that is all that's needed (a little light on the gap) that gets you thinking slightly differently about how to solve your problem. It made all the difference for me and our journey.
