Trapped by Success

You can be trapped by failure, feeling like you have few options, but you can also be trapped by success.

What needs to happen for you to change something big at your firm? Fat old men don’t typically make lifestyle changes until there’s been a heart event. You don’t typically make big adjustments to your staffing levels until your back is against the wall and your options have dwindled. You may not even dismiss a key staff member until that person’s coworkers basically force your hand.

Normal Forcing Functions

What I’ve described are the normal forcing functions that nudge us into action. There are two things happening, here, and they do not occur simultaneously. First, you have a strong inclination that you need to make some change. Second, something forces your hand to actually act on that knowledge.

I could pick a half dozen of you at random and you could tell me what change you should probably make, and if I promised to keep it between just the two of us, you would tell me some things like this:

• I should drink less alcohol.
• I should dismiss that high performer who doesn’t fit our culture.
• I should have that difficult conversation with this key client.
• I should really take a look at our positioning, make changes, and then build a marketing plan with that additional leverage.

Back to those two things that don’t happen simultaneously. The first thing has already happened (i.e., you have the knowledge or insight), but the second thing hasn’t been strong enough (i.e., nothing is forcing action). In other words, and referring to the illustration above, you’re in that “Fine” zone where things are, frankly, “good enough.”

Special Pressures of Success

You’re certainly aware of everything I’ve just outlined, but I want to point out one additional phase…and what sort of special opportunity it presents. That phase is when things are going really well.

In that “really good” scenario, which some of you find yourselves in right now, the same two things apply. First, you have a sense of what should change. But second, there’s virtually no pressure to do anything about it.

An illustration of this might be a large client (say, 30% of your client base). Or maybe it’s a steady stream of referrals that are so good that this notion of a marketing plan seems like such a waste of time. Or maybe you have an account manager who is killing it with clients and growing their accounts like crazy but undermines people at the firm.

Whatever it is that you know needs to change, things are going swimmingly and there’s never been less pressure to change things. And so they don’t change.

A Unique Time to Strike

But when things are going great, my friend, you have a very unusual opportunity to fix big things. You have the money and you have the altitude in case the airplane sputters just a little while you do some testing and fix whatever is necessary.

There are many firms you could say are “Trapped by Success”. And they might be trapped for years or even decades! You might survive, but your luck could also run out.

Always be looking. Always be adjusting. Always be thinking of the future.

Speaking of which, you should always be looking far ahead. Your team will never let you ignore the present, but they won’t’ care about the future like you will. They aren’t incentivized to.

As we mentioned in a recent 2Bobs podcast, pretend you could never sell your firm and that you were forced to live with it—good and bad—the rest of your working life. Why not just fix that stuff now, before your back is against the wall?

Being trapped when your options are tough is really bad, but we can also be trapped by success.