Raising the Bar

A “fixer” is a great word because I’m there to fix the business. But fixing the business is actually easy. It’s fixing the person that’s the problem. And if I have an approach to this that’s hard, here’s why. I believe that if I tell somebody, “Don’t do this, do that. Don’t do that, do this,” when I leave they go back to what they used to do. So I got to change the way you think. And to change the way you think, I got to shatter the way you think now to open your brain. That’s ugly. You’re going to kick your heels in, you’re going to push back, you’re going to scream and yell, a lot of people don’t like it. The episode this coming Sunday is the epitome of that. For five days, this guy and I screamed and yelled at each other face-to-face like this, we had to bring in security.

The one common denominator across all of them—and I’m going to say small businesses, big businesses—every failing business has a failing owner or a failing manager, right? When you talk to that failing manager, the common denominator is excuses. “Oh, the economy! Oh, I have a new competitor! Oh, prices! Oh, my costs are too high! The new tax!” It’s always an excuse. It’s never looking at me and saying, “Jon, I’m failing because of me.”
As soon as I get them to realize they’re failing because of them, now I can get somewhere…. I recognize in today’s political environment, I know that we have stresses upon us. I know the uncertainty of our regulations, the uncertainty of our taxes, the uncertainty of insurance, particularly for my industry that has typically a lot of part-time employees who have other jobs. All of these things scare the heck out of us. I get that. But you can still win. You can still dig your heels in and win. And there are people winning in every city and every market, so inasmuch as it might be more difficult, certainly more than it was a few years ago, you can still win. So I don’t accept those excuses.