American Business Brokers - March 2021

American Business Brokers - March 2021

American Business Brokers & Advisors Founder & President PROFESSIONAL INTERMEDIARY & MARKET MAKER FOR PRIVATELY HELD COMPANIES Author of ‘The Art of Buying and Selling a Convenience Store’ & ‘Hidden Wealth’ Involved in the Sale of 800+ Businesses Advisor • Consultant • Speaker

MARCH 2021

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Don’t Mistake Complacency for Contentment The Danger of Coasting in Your Business

If you’ve ever started a new business, you probably remember what it felt like at the beginning: the excitement of putting the pieces together, the thrill of learning new things, and the drive to make things better. Your only goals were to improve your systems, train your employees, and figure out how to increase your sales. Everything was a constant rush. There was never enough time to get everything done. It was both exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. As time passes, however, what happens? The business runs like a well-oiled machine and life is good. At least, it seems like things are good, since you don’t have as many fires to put out and your employees are trained well enough that there aren’t any catastrophes anymore. If you’re at this point with your business, you should ask yourself: Is my business a better business than when I started, or have I reached the point of complacency? Complacency can sneak up on you in many ways. Maybe you had a goal to get a certain number of sales or a certain number of stores. Maybe your goal was to ensure that one day, you wouldn’t have some of the responsibilities your business demanded of you at the beginning. We’ve all told ourselves that one day we would be able to let some parts of the business run themselves without our intervention. After that day comes, it is easy to settle into a mindset of complacency. We all strive for contentment in life. It helps level the emotional roller coaster we ride in running a business. However, mistaking complacency for contentment can be detrimental to your business.

Over the years, I have seen the inside of a lot of businesses. One thing I have noticed that has always puzzled me was when I would see a business in the right industry at the right time with the right people in the right place, and it had still managed to stall out. Even though the business was functioning and making money, it was not growing and taking advantage of that ideal situation. They had lost their drive. Losing your drive at that point is like having all the God-given talent in the world and not using it. The leaders of these successful businesses weren’t going backward, but they weren’t going forward, either. Now, it’s not my place to judge how anyone runs their business, but it always bothered me that they could do so much more if they wanted to.

Maybe it is time to look at your business and ask yourself: Am I doing everything I can do to the best of my ability to grow my business to the level it can be, or am I experiencing complacency? I know the last thing I want is to look back at my life and say, “Boy, if I would have only taken those risks or made those moves, I would be so much better off today.” I don’t think any of us wants to be singing the “would-have, could-have” song when the end of our business career finally arrives.

–Terry Monroe

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Laugh More, Age Less

Why Laughter Is Good for You

As we age, we’re told to wear sunscreen, eat more vegetables, take vitamins, and even walk more — all in hope that our internal clocks will slow down and we will age better. But something as simple as laughter could actually be one of the easiest ways to slow the ticking clock of aging. Scientists have long known that laughter can be therapeutic and help us live longer. It has been shown to reduce wear and tear on our bodies and improve our relationships. A Norwegian study found that those who prioritized humor were more likely to live past 70 than those who didn’t laugh often. At a biological level, laughter can reduce tension in your muscles and activate a powerful stress-relief response from your brain by releasing dopamine. Just one chuckle may even improve your breathing and heart function! In fact, laughing can work wonders for the heart. One study showed that laughter therapy helped reduce the blood pressure and cholesterol levels of its participants. Their blood circulation improved, too. Studies have also found that regular laughter can help strengthen your immune system, and it has long-term benefits for those with respiratory conditions.

In addition to your body, laughter is also good for your social life. (And we don’t mean that people will want to spend time with you if you have all the good jokes!) Throughout history, laughter has been an evolutionary sign of understanding. When there are language barriers, laughing together can create camaraderie and a tighter bond between people of different cultures. The dopamine release that comes with laughter aids in stress relief and creates powerful memories that can improve your mood and strengthen friendships. Of course, laughter has its downfalls, too. Laughing at someone else’s expense is detrimental to their health and can harm your relationships. So, stick to light jokes and actively seek shows, cartoons, or people who make you laugh. You’ll feel good, and your body will be pretty happy, too.

Sharing Your Priorities —Not Just Your Procedures

GETTING YOUR EMPLOYEES TO THE ‘75% LEVEL’

In the last edition of my newsletter, I talked about the “75% Employee Rule” and how I started looking to find employees who would do their job at 75% of the way I would do the job. Learning to let employees do their jobs wasn’t easy for me — it isn’t easy for most control freaks. Some days, you love your employees, and other days, you see them as a necessary evil. However, if you want your business to be scalable, you need good people working for you. So, how did I get my employees to perform at that 75% level? I learned that employees are not mind readers. They do their best with the information they have. Let me explain. After hiring an employee, most employers give them a description of their responsibilities, a list of their benefits, and an employee manual. Then, a supervisor will train the new employee until they’re ready to do

the work they were hired for without any help. Then, the supervisor leaves the new employee to their work, and they go about their work in a way you don’t like. So what happened? Where is the disconnect? The problem is that you shared the procedures with them but not your priorities. Everybody has certain quirks and priorities that affect how they want things done, and that includes both business owners and employees. So, instead of telling the employee what you want done, let them know how you want it done by sharing your top 5–10 priorities with them. Some of these priorities might be, for example: 1. You like detail. This means all the reports are completed and not done halfway. 2. Timeliness is important. Always be on time. 3. Use written communication. Always follow up a conversation with an email or letter to ensure nothing is lost in translation.

4. Stay on task. Once you start something, don’t stop until it is finished. 5. Fess up when you mess up. Be accountable, good or bad, for your actions. By sharing your priorities with your employees, you eliminate the possibility of their having to guess how you want the job done, and the odds are much better the employee will perform to at least that 75% level.

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Take a Break!

Customers Care About More Than Price DON’T FORGET TO LEVERAGE YOUR SMALL BUSINESS’S STRENGTHS!

WORD SEARCH

In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, people aren’t always rational, and they definitely don’t always make rational decisions. As a small-business owner, you’ve probably lamented this fact a time or two, wishing people would just do the rational thing so you could reasonably prepare for their actions and make a profit. But such is life — the only thing predictable about people is that they’re unpredictable. Be that as it may, small-business owners are in a unique position to take advantage of people’s irrational behaviors in one particular regard. Say the local big box store is selling widgets for $3 apiece. You sell widgets, so to get customers to your store, you price them at $2.50 apiece. A rational person would see that you sell them for less and, wanting to conserve their resources, shop at your store instead. Easy peasy, right? Well, yes, if it worked that way. As you may already know, customers don’t always shop at small businesses because they’re cheaper. They shop there because they get a number of other benefits. As a small-business owner, you can bring value to your customers that the big box stores can’t in the form of more personalized customer service and a better understanding of local issues and community needs. Even if your prices are a little higher than some other stores, you can still bring customers in the door by making them feel more welcome and comfortable in your business than anywhere else they might shop. Now, you might have already sensed this and capitalized on it — in which case, good! However, if your business has been struggling to get customers in the door recently, it might be a good time to think about not only how much you can affect prices before they hurt your bottom line but also about how you can tout your customer service and your impact on the community at large.

AQUAMARINE BASKETBALL BUTTERFLY CLOVER

DAFFODIL GREEN IDES LEPRECHAUN

MADNESS SPRING TANGERINE WOMEN

SUDOKU (SOLUTION ON PG. 4)

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INSIDE 7824 Estero Blvd., 3rd Floor Fort Myers Beach, FL 33931 1 2 The Danger of Coasting in Your Business The Easiest Anti-Aging Tactic? Laughter

Sudoku Solution

Getting Your Employees to the ‘75% Level’

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Customers Care About More Than Price

Take a Break

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Netflix’s CEO on Pursuing Your Ideas

What Can a Netflix CEO Teach You About Business?

If you ask Marc Randolph about his favorite place, he’ll mention an office building in Dallas, where Blockbuster had its corporate headquarters on the 27th floor. Randolph, one of the founders of Netflix and its first CEO, has no illusions about what happened to the former retail giant. In his new book, “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea,” Randolph shares how Netflix disrupted an industry and took the world by storm, an example every business leader can learn from. Randolph himself is fascinated by the nuts and bolts of business and entrepreneurship: “How does your business test new ideas? Can it happen faster? What’s the cost of having sloppy content hit the internet if it gets you out there sooner?” He examines how quickly you can put an idea in front of a customer where “you will learn more than you could in five months of R&D.” Randolph addresses

these issues and more in “That Will Never Work,” all the while explaining their relevance to entrepreneurs. If you’re looking for more salacious details, he spends much of the first chapter debunking the stories about who had the idea for Netflix and whether or not it was an epiphany. “That story is beautiful,” Randolph writes. “It’s useful. It is, as we say in marketing, emotionally true. But as you’ll see in this book, that’s not the whole story.” The whole story is one we’ll let you read for yourself, and there is plenty more where that came from. Anybody can research Netflix online, but “That Will Never Work” is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one of the 21st century’s most lucrative and secretive companies. Juicy stories pair well with marketing lessons, and the writing style is easy to get lost in — it really is a page-turner.

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