Is there a nail in the tire of your business?
Its a familiar story - a nail in my car tire spelled an
expensive trip to the shop. But my conversation with the owner
sparked some interesting business thoughts.
The guy told me 'You're actually quite lucky the tire deflated
so you could see you had a problem.'
Odd thing to say, I thought. 'Don't tires always go down when
they get a nail in them?'
'Not by a long way,' he said, 'In an awful lot of cases the hole
seals itself around the nail or screw and the driver doesn't
know anything about it until he has an accident.'
I had to press that one further.
It turns out, according to the tire guy, that many cars drive
quite happily with a nail or screw embedded in them until the
driver is on a freeway, doing speed, and the heat from the road
increases the pressure inside the tire.
At that point, the nail can often be popped out and the car
experiences a sudden blow-out.
If the driver is lucky he gets to the side of the road, but if
not ... well we don't want to go there.
My tire guy reckons that up to 40% of all high speed blow outs
are caused by objects coming out of tires rather that new things
going in!
He said, 'People always blame the road for their problems, but a
lot of the time they've been carrying the problem around with
them for months. They just didn't realize it.'
That tire guy should have been a business philosopher! That's
exactly the same as with business failures. Almost everyone
blames outside forces - the customers are awkward, the markets
are bad, the goverment doesn't care, the economy is shot to
pieces, but they ignore the fact that most of these outside
problems are navigated successfully by other businesses.
If you or your business are experiencing a problem right now,
try looking for the nail in your own tire rather than blame the
ones that may or may not be in your path.
Look inside yourself or your business to see where you may have
weaknesses that need to be addressed and don't leave them until
internal pressures make them explode.
A lot of businesses, either formally or informally conduct
regular reviews of their business, but most of the time those
reviews focus on how outside events can be better handled. And
that is good.
Business must have strategies in place to deal with difficult
customers, or adverse publicity, or unexpected changes in market
conditions.
But the really successful businesses and people also conduct
regular inward-looking reviews where they consciously look for
areas that could explode under pressure.
A regular internal review can't often find the nails in your
tires long before the pressures of life turn them from a
potential problem to a high speed skid and crash.