#173: Transforming Adversity into Business Strength
Running a business can be challenging, but the rewards are worth the effort. Despite the difficulties you may face, you can still take control of your future and use any adversity you face as an opportunity to grow. In this blog post, we'll explore how to transform adversity into strength and use it to your advantage in your business. We'll discuss the importance of understanding the problem, developing a plan of action, and staying motivated through the process. By following these steps, you will be able to develop the skills and tools needed to not only survive but to thrive in any situation.
The Power of Adversity in Business
Running a business is not for the faint of heart. It requires perseverance, determination, and a willingness to face challenges head-on. Adversity is an inevitable part of any business journey, but it also has the power to fuel growth and transformation. When faced with adversity, it can be easy to become discouraged and overwhelmed. However, by shifting our mindset and embracing adversity as an opportunity for growth, we can tap into a power that can propel our businesses forward.
The power of adversity lies in its ability to push us beyond our comfort zones and inspire us to think outside the box. It forces us to reevaluate our strategies, innovate, and adapt to changing circumstances. It teaches us resilience and grit, equipping us with the tools we need to navigate future challenges. Adversity also presents an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and failures, helping us refine our business practices and become more efficient.
In order to harness the power of adversity, it is important to approach it with a positive and growth-oriented mindset. Rather than viewing obstacles as insurmountable roadblocks, see them as stepping stones towards success. Embrace the challenges, learn from them, and use them as fuel to propel your business to new heights. By doing so, you can transform adversity into strength and use it as a catalyst for growth in your business.
Common Obstacles Faced by Businesses
Running a business is no easy feat, and it's important to acknowledge the common obstacles that many businesses face along the way. One common obstacle is financial constraints. Starting and growing a business requires capital, and it can be challenging to secure funding, especially for small businesses. Another obstacle is competition. In today's fast-paced and saturated market, businesses need to constantly innovate and differentiate themselves to stand out from the crowd. Additionally, finding and retaining talented employees can be a struggle, as attracting top talent requires competitive salaries and a positive work culture.
Another obstacle faced by businesses is managing cash flow. Irregular cash flow can lead to difficulties in paying bills, employees, and suppliers on time. Lack of proper planning and forecasting can contribute to this problem. Finally, external factors such as economic downturns, industry disruptions, or changes in government regulations can pose significant challenges to businesses.
Navigating through these obstacles requires strategic planning, resilience, and adaptability. By being aware of these common obstacles and taking proactive steps to address them, business owners can position themselves for success and find ways to turn these challenges into opportunities for growth.
TRANSFORMING Adversity into Strength: The Mindset Shift
When facing adversity in your business, one of the most important shifts you can make is in your mindset. It's natural to feel overwhelmed or discouraged when challenges arise, but by embracing a growth-oriented mindset, you can transform adversity into strength.
Instead of viewing obstacles as roadblocks, see them as opportunities for growth and learning. Shift your perspective from "Why is this happening to me?" to "What can I learn from this experience?" This mindset shift allows you to approach adversity with curiosity and a desire to find solutions.
Another important aspect of the mindset shift is focusing on what you can control. Instead of dwelling on the things that are out of your control, such as market conditions or economic downturns, focus on the actions you can take to overcome challenges. This empowers you to find creative solutions and take ownership of your business success.
Finally, practice self-compassion and resilience. Adversity is inevitable in business, but how you respond to it determines your outcome. Stay committed, motivated, and flexible. Remember that setbacks are not failures but opportunities to learn and grow.
By making this mindset shift, you can harness the power of adversity and use it as a catalyst for growth in your business.
Taking Responsibility for Your Business Success
As a business owner, the success of your business ultimately falls on your shoulders. Taking responsibility for your business success is crucial if you want to overcome obstacles and thrive. It means owning your decisions, actions, and outcomes, and not blaming external factors for any setbacks you may encounter.
Taking responsibility begins with being proactive. Instead of waiting for things to happen, take the initiative and actively seek out opportunities for growth and improvement. This could mean investing in your skills and knowledge, seeking mentorship or coaching, or continuously learning and staying ahead of industry trends.
It also means being accountable for the outcomes of your decisions. If a strategy doesn't work out as planned, instead of pointing fingers or making excuses, take a step back and evaluate what went wrong. Learn from your mistakes, make necessary adjustments, and move forward with determination.
Another important aspect of taking responsibility is staying committed to your vision and goals. It's easy to get sidetracked or discouraged when faced with adversity, but staying focused and driven will help you navigate through challenges and stay on track.
Ultimately, taking responsibility for your business success is about being the captain of your ship. By taking ownership of your decisions, actions, and outcomes, you empower yourself to overcome obstacles, make the necessary changes, and create the success you desire.
Inspiring and Motivating Your Team Through Adversity
Building a strong and resilient team is essential for overcoming adversity in your business. As a leader, it is your role to inspire and motivate your team to stay focused and committed, even in the face of challenges.
One way to inspire your team is by leading by example. Show them that you are willing to put in the effort and go the extra mile. Your dedication and perseverance will inspire them to do the same. Additionally, be transparent and communicate openly with your team about the challenges and setbacks your business may be facing. By sharing the realities of the situation, you can build trust and create a sense of unity.
Another important aspect of inspiring and motivating your team is recognizing and celebrating their achievements. Take the time to acknowledge their hard work and dedication, and provide them with opportunities for growth and development. Encourage them to share their ideas and perspectives, and empower them to take ownership of their work.
Finally, create a positive and supportive work environment. Encourage open communication and collaboration, and provide opportunities for your team to connect and build strong relationships. By fostering a sense of belonging and teamwork, you can inspire your team to overcome adversity together.
Remember, your team is your greatest asset. By inspiring and motivating them through adversity, you can build a strong and resilient team that can overcome any challenge and achieve success.
Listen to the Show:
Laura 00:00
Growing a company as an entrepreneur is a lot like climbing a mountain, and you know that the view from the mountaintop is going to be awesome. You know that when you get there, it is going to be well worth everything that it took to get to that point. But when you're climbing that mountain, there is always going to be a rock in the road, there is always going to be something that's going to get in the way of you being able to climb this mountain effectively. And you get to decide, what am I going to do with this rock in the road? Am I going to get out some dynamite and blow it up? Am I going to climb it and then get myself back on the other side of it to keep going? Am I going to go around it? Am I going to dig a hole underneath it? Or am I going to look at it and say No way, this rock is not movable. I'm going to head in the other direction. I'm going to backpedal for a little while, find a new path and keep climbing this mountain.
Laura 00:55
And this is something that we all encounter. If this is something that you think oh my gosh, you know, why does this keep happening to me in entrepreneurship? Why do I keep running into these rocks in the road? It's because maybe the people that you're following just don't talk about it enough, because it's something that everybody encounters. Anybody who has climbed the mountain or started to climb the mountain and pretends that there's no rocks in the road, and that it's all just wonderful and easy, is probably just not telling you the truth. Okay, so let's just put that out there right now. But what happens is that when we don't know that this is normal, or we aren't prepared to be flexible, and that's the key here is I think, underneath the core attribute of resilience is flexibility. When we haven’t conditioned ourselves to be flexible, then it's very stressful as an entrepreneur. So, in today's episode, I want to talk to you about how to be flexible when we're growing a business. When we get to the point where we're encountering this rock in the road, what do we do? How do we handle it? And how can we make it easier on ourselves by having that mindset of flexibility when things go wrong, so that we don't keep bumping up against ourselves while climbing the mountain. So, stay tuned. And I will be sharing more on exactly how to do this in this upcoming video podcast.
Laura 02:21
Welcome to the AI-Driven marketing podcast. This is a place where we deliver quick and insightful weekly tips about 10 minutes or less on what's new and groundbreaking in the world of marketing AI. I'm your host, Laura Meyer a 20 plus year entrepreneur and marketing expert. If you are excited about staying ahead of the curve and harnessing the potential of AI in your marketing strategies, you're in the right place. Let's go!
Laura 02:52
Hi, my name is Laura Meyer, I'm a growth strategist to some of the country's top companies. I'm also a book author, a five-week best-selling book author of Win-Win and I'm a mom and
I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years now. So, I've definitely encountered my share of adversity. And I want to share a story with you that was so interesting that happened this week, that reminded me of how important it is to be flexible on how we grow our businesses or what we do when we encounter these obstacles that was not related to business. It was actually related to tennis. So earlier this week, there was an emergency in our community, a prisoner, a man who is a murderer, escaped our local prison, scaled the wall made the news and he is on the run. In fact, seven days later, when I'm recording this podcast, he is still on the run. At first, I think everybody assumed up he'll get caught. Not a problem. There's a lot of people around here that nobody looks like we're bringing in law enforcement, and we have dogs and helicopters, and we'll find this guy, well, we can't find this guy. He keeps robbing houses and eluding police enforcement and it's really stressful.
Laura 04:10
So, I woke up on Tuesday morning, and found out that our kids’ school was cancelled because the man, this criminal was seen near some of the schools that are in our school district. Well, needless to say, of course it's completely nerve racking. We fortunately have a very loud and obnoxious dog in our house. But that was like my only peace of mind that we live in this area where the search is taking place. So, I have a tennis match scheduled on Tuesday morning. So, we all in it's in a neighboring community where the tennis team and the tennis match were to take place. So, we get in touch with the captain of the opposing team and we're like, hey, listen, like there's a murder in the woods. Literally. We're going to stay home with our kids, and the opposing captain was having none of it. We were hearing things like, oh, well, you know, we were inconvenienced to, or I had to come back from my beach vacation early for this match. And of course, that didn't go over well, with our team or our captain, we were kind of like, there's a killer in the woods. Like, let's not do this right now. Like we're all trying to figure out how we're going to manage childcare and how we're going to manage our work schedule, and if our community safe and like, can we just move on from the fact that tennis is not that important compared to what's happening here. And these ladies were inflexible. So, thinking to myself, like, you know, I ended up getting on the phone with one of them that I knew. And I said, listen, I really like you, we see each other around, but I could not disagree with you more on this particular issue. This is ridiculous. You need to let it go. And allow us to reschedule and not give us a hard time and not bring it up to the cup board, which is the governing body for this particular tennis match. And, and like go on with your day knowing that none of us want this to happen.
Laura 06:07
But she was so stuck on what she thought should be the way that that morning was supposed to go, like very rigid about it. And there was no flexibility. And it was just so interesting to me, because of course, again, I think we were already all stressed as moms given the situation. And then we were kind of like it, it got contentious, which is not always my personal style. Like,
normally I'm not that way. But I think we were all just so freaked out by the situation. But ultimately, I left that encounter wondering why? Why is it that we are so attached the way that we think things should be that even when there is such a big emergency, we can't be flexible. There's something about our brains being attached to and married to and having this formula for what we want to be true that it was impossible to be able to come up with other solutions with this opposing team. In a lot of ways, I think we do this to ourselves. I think a lot of times, we think it shouldn't be this hard, or it shouldn't be this way. And you might be wondering, okay, Laura, why are we talking about this on a marketing tech podcast, because marketing and technology have variables that enter into the mix every single day, every single week that we didn't anticipate, we couldn't have any control over. And that we get to decide what we're going to do with that rock in the road. It happens all the time, I can give you two quick examples of how this impacted our clients in the last few days.
Laura 07:48
One example is that Facebook ad targeting was incorrectly put into place by one of the client’s team members, she went in and changed the targeting variables. And the campaign didn't work as well as we were hoping it was a waste of money. And a pretty big mistake. But again, it's we have to keep going we can't get hung up on that. That is a very common example of things that go wrong when a marketing campaign is deployed. And when it comes to tech, just within the last week or two, we had to upgrade all of our clients to a new level of what's called A to P compliance, which is text outbound texting compliance. And because a lot of our AI systems are based on SMS texting, we ended up having to create this whole new legal component to our organization that wasn't planned on. Nobody's reimbursing me for and one of our biggest clients is still not approved for it, we're still continually trying to push their approval through. So, it's again, these are things that happen all the time. And what happens is, I think when we get so attached the way that things should be, it's harder to move through these challenges. Or we might be saying, well, it shouldn't be this way, or this shouldn't have ever happened, or I should have been told earlier or this should be easier. There's no upside to thinking about it that way in business, there's, there's nothing good that's going to come out of that it's just going to create stress for you and your team. And then a lot of times you miss out on opportunities, because we're so caught up in this formula, or this prescription, or this manual in our heads of how we think business should go. So here are some tips on what I would recommend doing. If you find yourself in this position of having to be flexible, but also being really stressed out by not wanting to be flexible, which I think many of us experience particularly if we're tired or just had a day or the end of the week or whatever.
Laura 09:51
So, the first is really to make sure that you have a mental plan for how you're going to respond to situations that are outside of your control. Like make sure that mentally you know, you're not surprised by the rock in the road. And I think what happens is as entrepreneurs, we are
incredibly optimistic. As entrepreneurs, we think we can beat the odds. Because if we didn't believe that we would have never started out in entrepreneurship, right, most small businesses, most businesses don't make it. So, we're naturally positive, we're naturally optimistic, we naturally think there is not going to be a rock in the road, which is a good attribute. That's what gets us started. But then it can also create a lot of stress, when we encounter that obstacle, and we think, oh, my gosh, like, I didn't know this was happening, or I joined this program, or I became part of this business model, because I thought it was this way. Well, now this is happening. And I didn't count on that. And it's creating so much turmoil in my brain, right. So just know, the unexpected will happen. You want to in business, always leave margin for things to go wrong. I'm a very experienced marketer, I would be considered one of the top marketers in my niche. And still, when something goes out perfectly, I think of it as like a miracle. It is not typical, sometimes things when people respond, or ads perform, or creative goes in one direction versus another. And this is very typical. That's why we monitor it. And a lot of what I do is help my clients realize that it is in the implementation of marketing, it's in how we continually adjust to the information that we're receiving, that gets them the result, not this perfectly created strategy upfront, we create it based on our abilities based on my experience based on a little bit of intuition, and what I call the sniff test, which tends to be pretty accurate at this point. But still, we stay flexible, because an adjusted campaign will always outperform a campaign that doesn't have that adjustment along the way.
Laura 12:13
The second is just becoming very unattached to how you get the result. So, this is something that I learned from Brooke Castillo, who I love her podcast, The Life Coach School. And when I learned this about entrepreneurship, it was so helpful to me, which is to become unattached to how you get to that destination. So have big goals, have big revenue goals, have those numbers in your head, really encourage your team and lead your team around those big goals. And make sure that everybody is motivated and aligned around where you're going, and why you why you want to get there, and how you'll all celebrate together when you achieve that next milestone. And it's important to be very open to how you get there, it's important to be so open to the how. Because if you're not open to the house, so stay committed to the what, but be open to the how be unattached to the how. So be committed to the outcome, but not the path to get there. Because if you're climbing that mountain, right, you're climbing that mountain, there's a rock in the road, and you're like, no, this is the path. This is the path. I already mapped it out in my strategic plan in my planning process in my quarterly plan, this is the path, this rock should not be here, and might not be a rock that you blow up, dig up, walk around or climb, it might be one of those rocks where you back up and choose another path. If you can't be flexible in that way, what happens is you keep creating these ceilings, you keep creating these revenue plateaus because we're so committed to the how, which is great. But that in flexibility prevents you from being open to available alternatives on the path to success.
Laura 14:12
And the third is really making sure that you can overcome adversity and have some mantras knowing that all adversity has a purpose, right. So, knowing adversity is a constant, but it serves that positive purpose and to tool for growth in improvement. And when you can start looking at it that way, then you can start moving through it a lot more with a lot more ease and flow. So, here's just some of my mantras. The first is we'll figure it out. We always do. So, I say this to my team all the time, like something will come up and I'll be like, oh about that one. Like, for example, this text compliance issue that we recently had, and I was like, you know what? We'll figure it out, we always do. And, and when you say that out loud, you usually do. It's kind of amazing how that works. And the second that we often hear ourselves saying, and I say it a lot. And now at this point, I hear my team saying it a lot, which is I'm glad we ran into this issue. So now we know what to do next time. Right. And in this is such a mindset shift, particularly for strong operations team members, who might be very, very, very good at process, and a little frustrated when their process doesn't go perfectly. This is a great mantra for that team member where you can say, I'm glad we ran into this, like, good, we ran into this, now we have a system, now we have a process. So next time it happens, we know exactly what to do. And that mantra tends to do really, well, with anybody who's like, oh, this shouldn't be happening. And if you're that person in your mind, where you're like, oh, this shouldn't be happening, I recommend that you try saying that to yourself. And this is something I say to myself, a lot of times, if I find myself really frustrated by, you know, just how hard sometimes entrepreneurship is, I will say, You know what this is what separates the women from the girls like, and I will often jokingly say it to my staff, or I will say it to myself, but it's true, like this is what separates people who are just starting out in business, who are pretty green, who maybe have all of that optimism within them, which is great, but really haven't encountered any major issues yet, to the ones that are able to grow and mature as entrepreneurs that are the ones that are able to build and then exit and then build again, these moments are what separates those two levels of sophistication in business.
Laura 16:55
So, remember, the secret is to overcoming adversity is that will, it will always be there like it's not going to go away. And being able to stay flexible is part of the big picture that I want to recommend that you consider, which is that every time that you run into a rock in the road, it has a positive purpose, you're supposed to learn from it, you're supposed to become better for it. And knowing that there is a balance, like there's times where you're just like I am, I just cannot deal with this rock today, I'm going to take a step back, take a breather, do some yoga, play some tennis, and come back to it later. And a lot of times, that is enough for me to know what to do with that rock. But just know the view gets better and better. The more times that you can, can overcome this adversity. So, my question to you if you're listening to this is, what was the last time that you dealt with major adversity in the business? And how did you handle it? And if you might be thinking, gosh, I don't know, it might be something that you're just
reacting responding to without even realizing it. I know, in the first probably decade of being an entrepreneur that's 100% me like I just reacting responding very reactive, right? And then as we just have more and more experienced entrepreneurs, we start to notice this feels familiar, huh? I think I've run into this before, huh? Last time this happened, I know exactly what went down. And I don't think I want it to go that way again. And what you'll find is you start to build that resilience through flexibility. So, I just want you to notice, are you reacting all the time? Or are you able to stay in that steady state regardless of what's happening in your business? Let me know I would love to hear from you. You can comment below this video. If you're listening to the podcast, just leave me a message on Instagram or your favorite platform. And if you loved this episode, or if you were talking about this very issue with a friend recently, I would really appreciate it if you shared this episode with maybe someone you know, or you left a review if you're listening to the podcast. As always, I really appreciate you being here. And I'll see you next time on the AI driven marketing podcast.
Laura 19:20
Thank you for tuning in to the AI-Driven marketing podcast. Before we wrap up, I just want to remind you that you can learn more about how to make more sales with AI by going to makemoresaleswithai.com. This is where I dive deeper into the AI revolution in marketing with our free training. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, please share it with others who might find it valuable. And if you can also just take a moment to leave us a review. I would greatly appreciate it. Your support helps us continue to bring you the top insights in the field of AI driven marketing. Until next time, remember AI is here and it's transforming the marketing landscape. Stay Ahead, stay informed, and most importantly, stay excited. I'll see you soon!
Welcome to the AI-Driven Marketing Podcast! Join host Laura Meyer, a 20+ year veteran entrepreneur and marketing expert, as she unveils the future of marketing that's already at your fingertips. Each episode offers quick, valuable insights, news, and practical tips about how AI is revolutionizing the marketing landscape, shaping how businesses engage with customers, and enhancing marketing strategies. Tune in to stay ahead, informed, and excited about the remarkable opportunities that AI brings to the world of marketing.