“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do” - Henry Ford.
All throughout my life I have had the pleasure of doing things most people dream of. The part they don't realize is each of these events, was a dream once for me too. Two years ago, we shut down our business to re-think what we did. We asked the customers we had, what they liked and what we could do better for them. We analyzed everything we did, and stopped doing several things that looked profitable and turned out not to be. We placed more emphasis in other areas that were very profitable and offered a very high level of service our customers were asking for.
In October of that year, I submitted an article to my friend Jason Knott at CEPro, and got flamed in a big way when he published my outlook online. The prevailing view was that shutting down to work on the business would put most companies out of business. Clearly to me this begged the question: Why be in business? What no one knew was that we had already shut down, re-evalutated, changed staff, closed a location and moved forward. I believe we did so successfully. We weren't turning the gross numbers we did the previous year, but we were still alive after 10 years in an industry abandoned by Tweeter and Circuit City as well as a host of other smaller companies across the country. Even then it was still comfortable.
