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Excerpt
Sean:
So resilience. I wonder how you teach the businesses? What you say? What the most common questions are?
Lee:
Business is like the seasons. In summer, there’s lots of profit, all the investment in the world, more budget that you can even spend and it feels amazing. But right in that corner, it’s going to be winter for your business and how you invest in the summer will ultimately impact how well you can be resilient in the winter. And you want to actually invest in ultimately a car, wooly hat, and some gloves and some boots for your business, because those challenging times are going to come. Your people are going to be your recovery through those times. So actually helping people, themselves, your employees, the people that you work with, your collaborators, starting to look at how your decisions affect all these different areas, even looking at society, the environment, your shareholders, and your clients and customers. How do your decisions affect all these stakeholders at the end of the day? Because that’s what and where your resilience is going to come.
Because in the challenging times, your customers and your clients would stay with you through the challenge because you’ve been mindful of them all these years. They feel like you are their supplier, their service, their products. Looking at your employees they’ll know that you’ve invested in them so they will continue to dig deeper and invest in you. They’ll know to sit in the right train because all of a sudden, you know, it’s a bit rickety. This line is a bit shaky. But they will stay on that train because they have faith in the leadership to get them to the destination.
And that resilience is really born from that challenge, like my business started in a recession. And I see two sides. See the businesses in the corner, holding the shield up, weathering the storm – it’s understandable. Without your bottom line being secure, without a level of cashflow and profit, then your business is not sustainable. So really, it doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, what you invest it on. But it does because if you stand there and weather the storm, you might survive. But what have you got after all your clothes have been blown off by the wind? Because at first it doesn’t discriminate. There’s always winter coming and it’s now the people who stood up and saying, you know what it’s cold, but we’re going to keep moving forward. We’re gonna actually keep investing in our people and actually our people are gonna push us forward. When spring comes, they are going to be the ones digging the field, planting the new bulbs that are gonna grow into the amazing next summer.
Start investing now in the winter, and you will see fruit in the spring and bloom in the summer. And that’s what resilience is. It’s about really looking about how you’re going to bounce back. Instead of worrying about where the threats are coming, actually seeing the crisis as a challenge, as a time to perform, as a time to innovate. It’s a time to think differently and be creative.
And it’s just, just one thing. I want to leave listeners with Sean, is this principle: In the economic crisis, my business was born, but my business is a little business that I’ve just exited and it allowed me to grow as a human being. But look at the bigger picture. What other businesses were born out of the economic crisis in 2008?
Let’s use this crisis to disrupt the status quo, to do things differently. So shake it up because that’s what you can do. And there will be medium and small startups today who are going to be in 10 years’ time, the movers and shakers and future leaders of 2030. Start today. Maybe your idea, all those things together, your strengths, what you love, what you bring value, what you can monetize, maybe that is just the next thing that is going to take and make a massive difference in the world. So stop trying to make it perfect. Just start executing and evolve it, evolve, and evolve it.
