Every business has areas that aren’t so awesome to think about or look at. Every business makes mistakes and has customers who would not shop with them even if they were the last remining business on earth. No business is perfect and no people are ever perfect, and honestly we do ourselves and the many customers who do love us a big disservice when we let our focus be on trying for perfection. Each piece of a business is important, from the customer service to the leadership to the actual product/service to the marketing, but so often what I hear from other business owners in all industries is about what they can’t do. “I can’t go viral on social media.” “I can’t come up with ideas for my newsletter.” “I can’t get customers to share reviews.” “I can’t get employees to stay.” “I can’t come up with a product/service that everyone loves.” “My employees don’t seem to care about the customers.” I’m sure you can add some more ‘can’ts’ to that list that you’ve either said or heard.
And I get that. I’m sure most of us could go on for quite the time period about all the issues we have. And to an extent we should because we should recognize the issues or failures we have and work to improve them so that we hopefully can avoid those issues in the future, or at least not let them get worse than they might already be. And the negative reviews help us better target our marketing, and help our potential customers know if a product or service is right for them before they buy and then have to get a refund or choose to leave a nasty review. But what if instead we focused on the good?
What if instead we shared about/focused on the cool marketing group we found or how many pages we wrote or a positive review about a product we’ve had forever but found a new fan or the interesting article that taught us something new or the new partnership we’re doing with another local business or the employee who has made a measurable difference in our business or the (anonymous/redacted) progress that a client has made? So instead of letting the bad or difficult overwhelm us, what if we did better about paying attention to the progress, the good, the exciting, the breakthroughs, however small they might be? I’ve seen that when we focus on, celebrate even, the good, the progress, the advancements more tend to show up and we’re able to make better progress than we do when we’re fighting the failure battle. What good things have happened in your business recently and how can you and your team do a better job of focusing on and highlight the good in your business?