Beware Growth (Preparing for 2023)

Earl Nightingale once said prophetically, at least for me, that there will come a time in your life when you'll have the opportunity to accomplish more in 12 months than in the previous 12 years. As you prepare for 2023, this lesson will help support you to that end.

I was once involved with a very interesting business some years ago. In my office, there's a shelf full of Eagles because we at one time were in Eagle business.

We had a Brass Eagle and we sold hundreds of thousands of these brass birds. But our customers were not regular consumers, not like you who’d buy it to put on your bookshelf. Our customers were Boy Scouts of America buying a thousand birds at a whack for their awards program, the US Navy buying thousands and thousands of birds, and corporation-type clients buying them for incentives and awards.

That was a nifty little business, very profitable at a certain level.

And one gal ran the whole thing. She took all the customer calls, processed all the orders, ordered all stuff, and made sure all stuff was good. One employee.

And we tried one year to print a catalog to send out to customers of everything we did to try and press that business larger, but each time we lost money. And we did a lot of logical stuff too.

We thought, “Okay, it's Eagles, right? They want stuff with the Eagles on it.” So we should be able to do polo shirts, baseball caps, and grave briefcases. None of that worked.

“Okay, these are all sales executives buying from us. That's like 80% of the business, so let's sell them tapes, sell motivational stuff, educational stuff.” Nope.

They wanted to buy a brass bird on a wood block. That's it. And that's all they were gonna buy from us.

Now they had in their head, “These are the guys we get the brass bird on the wood block from,” and we were woefully unsuccessful at educating any of them that we did anything else.

The point being, there are some businesses that you can't press beyond a certain point profitably. Some businesses are not made to just continue to grow and grow and grow and grow. And when you try and grow them beyond their level of profitability, they turn from winners into losers.

So growth is not necessarily always the answer.

If you’re planning on making 2023 the year that changes everything, but you’re hitting a similar pain point, then it may simply be time to change directions. Amazon’s value in the 90’s as a book business was too small and they needed to pivot and grow. What pivots will you make?

If you’re a member of our NO B.S. Letter, you get monthly strategy from myself, plus 4+ courses and books instantly that, if listened to regularly, can help you pivot to create the growth (or changes) your business needs.

If you’re not a member yet, let me give you access to courses and more for free when you try our NO B.S. Letter today at nobsletter.com and see all of the other bonuses waiting to make 2023 your break-through year.