With all its travails and gyrations, 2020 is a Lesson Found. It’s a matter of what we do with those lessons.
The first step in turning the 2020 quagmire into valuable lessons is an assessment. How did you and your company react to events? Did you continue along your pre-March path or adapt? What were the outcomes of the path you chose?
Next comes learning through evaluation. Considering your chosen path in 2020, what could you have done to improve the outcomes? This flows into the final step: How will you apply these lessons to improving your company and ultimately your outlook on life?
That latter point, extending these Lessons Found to outside your business, is essential. It is all too easy to become so engaged in the company’s operations and complexities that we become estranged from other relationships. After all, these relationships are the reason you are building the company. Or, at least they should be.
One other Lesson Found: Don’t fool yourself into believing that the events of 2020 are a once-and-done phenomenon. The magnitude and concentration of 2020’s events will, hopefully, never be replicated. But other circumstances result in similar consequences every year and all the time. The difference is that, while the consequences of 2020 were universal, in a more typical year the consequences are felt by individual companies. That is why contingency planning is so important.
This Lesson Found is probably the most difficult one I’ve shared. After all, “learning” this lesson entails unbiased self-reflection which is hard to accomplish on your own. That is one benefit of joining with other CEOs and Business Owners in a peer advisory team whose primary agenda is to strengthen each other’s business.
Curious how the Small Business Forum’s peer team can help you and your business? Click on this link to schedule a short phone call to learn about the SBF peer advisory team and see if it is a good fit for you and your needs.
Life brings us lessons every day. Sometimes from expected sources. And sometimes from sources and situations we never would have thought possible. Either way, they are a gift found. I am fortunate to find these types of lessons regularly and wanted to share them with you with this weekly series of “Business Lessons Found”.
Did you recently receive the gift of a Business Lesson Found that has helped you with management, marketing or another aspect in business? We would love to hear about it. Comment below or send an email to let us know.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels; Image of “2020” by Dung Tran from Pixabay
