Jim Hinshaw
Contributing Writer
Improvement Professional, President & Sales

Saw one of the best movies ever, certainly the best we saw this year: Hacksaw Ridge.  It starred Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man), he plays a conscientious objector who enlists in the Army in WWII.  He wants to help in any way he can, but he is a Seventh Day Adventist, he will not touch a gun, feels it is not right to kill another human.

So he joins in as a medic.  He is brought up on charges; facing a court martial on grounds he did not obey a direct order.  In his hearing, he states he wants to serve; he wants to help save his fellow soldiers.  He had a goal, to be involved in rendering aide to anyone who was hurt on the battlefield.  Outstanding movie, he finds himself at Okinawa, facing Hacksaw Ridge, controlled by the Japanese.  They have to climb up a sheer cliff on rope ladders to engage the enemy on the top.  They get busted, overrun by a never-ending supply of bad guys, dozens of our guys killed or wounded.  A call for retreat is sounded; they scramble back over the wall.  All except Andrew, who stays to help the wounded.

He brings down 75 wounded over the next two days, by himself, lowering them down with a harness he made out of rope.  Just as he said, he enlisted to help others.  Without a weapon.  That was his goal, his desire, his plan from the beginning.

My question for you is this: what is your goal in your business or your job?  Michael Gerber shares several reasons people go into business for themselves in his excellent book The E-Myth.  Some want more freedom, many just want a better paying job.  Others want to put together a legacy for their family, some want to change the landscape completely with dozens of franchises.  How do you and your company fit into the equation?

More importantly, do your employees know what you stand for, what your company values are.  Have you empowered your team to do what is necessary to achieve the goals you had set from the start?  In fact, have the goals changed with the passing of time?  Has the model changed, are you in fact working in different areas than just a few years ago?  Many of my clients have moved from just HVAC or Plumbing to a company focused on both trades.  They realize the ability that synergy brings, the best business comes from your existing customers buying additional goods and services from you.

If your company started out serving one particular segment of the population, then has moved to work in other segments, it may take new skills, new and different employees, and usually new management tools.  It becomes painfully clear that you need a different skill set to work a multi-million dollar company than one that is a start-up with two employees.  Andrew Garfield plays a man who dreamed of helping others, never realizing how difficult that would be.  He is stranded on the top of Hacksaw Ridge, surrounded by the enemy and NO WEAPON!  He adapted to the challenge, improvised, and saved lives.  I am confident that he did not imagine how that would play out, he simply stepped up and did what he needed to do.  Impressive when the rest of his team (the whole platoon) retreated, he stayed behind and did his thing.

So how do we work with a new set of parameters, maybe a new direction completely?  Many  who did new construction found themselves grossly overstaffed, no work on the calendar at all when that market died in 2007.  Some were able to change course, move into the service and remodel business, diversify their company.  They realized they needed a new category of employee, or at least their employees needed a vastly different skill set than before.  Training becomes more important, customer skills move to a higher level of importance.  It is not enough to know how to bend some sheet metal, in the service and replacement market one of the skills needed is the ability to offer solutions, accessories and services that we have not offered in the past, and share those benefits with homeowners.

This is the start of a new year, hope you had a great Christmas with some family time.  I believe this time of year is the perfect time to reflect on what happened last year, what worked, what didn’t.  Now we got to get back to work, put together a plan to move the needle on sales this year, perhaps in a new sector.

So these days, plan on re-inventing yourselves on a regular basis, plan on training your team weekly, and accept the reality that we must do something different this year than we did last year.  Darwin says it is not the smartest of the species that survives, not the strongest.  It is the ones who can adapt to change best that survive.  Be an adapter.