No One Cares About Your Business as Much as You Do
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode number 30 of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast.
Before we start today, I just want to say that this episode, episode 30 represents a big milestone for me since before I started the podcast I told myself that I was going to release 30 episodes and then kind of see how things went.
And I’m still here and I’m planning to carry on, since the feedback from listeners has been very positive, which makes me very happy.
So, thank you for taking the time to listen. I really appreciate it!
And if you have any specific feedback or a topic or question that you’d like me to cover or answer in a future episode, just let me know by emailing me on david@tennisbusinessacademy.com
I want this podcast to be as useful as possible to you, so the more feedback you give me the more I can tailor the content to help you!
So, don’t be shy!
Ok, with that said, let’s get to today’s topic.
Now, if you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that other people don’t seem to care about your business as much as you do, right?
I mean, if you own or run a business you want everything to go smoothly. You want everything to be perfect.
You want every player to enjoy their tennis, every parent to love what you do for their kids, every committee member to think that you’re amazing and to support you 100% and every person you employ or work with to always be professional and to always work as hard as humanly possible.
And while sometimes all of this happens, the reality is that it happens less than what we’d like it to.
After all, we would like it to happen 100% of the time.
But of course, this isn’t realistic.
Perfection doesn’t exist.
And it most certainly doesn’t exist for you, if you’re in charge of running a business.
Why? Because you’ll be aware of every little thing that goes wrong almost always.
If a customer is unhappy guess who they contact.
If a member of staff doesn’t know how to solve a problem guess who they come to ask for help.
I mean that’s the burden of running a business, right?
The buck stops with you, so that means that you’ll almost always be involved when something hasn’t gone quite right.
You’ll always see and be aware of the problems.
And most problems are caused by people!
By customers, by staff members and even by yourself.
And when you do have to work through issues, I find that it’s very useful to remember that no one cares.
Or at least, no one cares as much I do.
Sure, if you’re lucky you’ll find people who will care nearly as much as you do, like your significant other, or your family or a good friend or even a great employee.
But realistically, no one is going to care as much as you do.
No will be willing to put as much into your business as you will.
And this is important to acknowledge, I think.
Because if you’re expecting other people to care as much as you do, you’ll be perpetually disappointed and frustrated.
And that’s really no way to live!
It will put a strain on yourself and your business.
I mean, if you’re a coach, your committee probably won’t care as much about how many kids you got playing on your coaching programme as you will.
The coach that works for you won’t take care of the equipment as well as you do.
Or they won’t want to work extra hours without getting paid.
Or sometimes a player will take advantage of a generous offer and then leave without even so much as a thank you.
And so on, and so on, you get the idea.
It would be great if none of that ever happened.
But it does.
And it does because people care about your business less than you do.
For us it can sometimes feel like the end of the world and for them it’s just something that they haven’t even thought about.
It’s such a small thing in their world that they haven’t even noticed it.
Ok, now, why am I telling you this?
Why am I recording a whole episode on this topic?
Because I get a lot of emails and have a lot of conversations about exactly this.
How a lot of us in the industry who are doing our best to grow our businesses and the sport with it, get frustrated with how other people are behaving.
And like I said earlier, as far as I’m concerned that’s no way to live.
So, what should we do about it?
I propose 3 things.
The first one is to be aware of it.
To be aware that expecting other people to care about YOUR business as much as YOU do, is setting yourself up for aggravation and frustration.
That’s never going to happen unless you give them 50% ownership and even then it might still not happen.
So, be aware of this and stop trying to get everyone to care as much as you do. It’s a waste of energy.
The second thing, and perhaps the most important one, is to learn not to take things personally.
Don’t take it personally when a player leaves to another club or another coach.
Don’t take it personally when a coach doesn’t work as hard as you’d like them to.
Or when a parent doesn’t thank you when you go above and beyond for their kid.
Don’t take it personally when a committee member shows you one way or another that they don’t care.
Or when a club member seems to be making your life difficult on purpose.
As much as possible do what you can to remain unemotional.
To remain cool and rational.
EVEN if what happened is unfair. Even if someone is being a complete and utter idiot.
Because the reality is that taking things personally does NOT help the situation.
Reacting emotionally and without thinking is not really that conducive to coming up with good solutions and responses to problems.
And at the end of the day if the goal is to succeed in business then what you want above all are good solutions and responses.
Now, there are limits, of course.
I’m not suggesting that you let people walk all over you.
That’s a terrible idea.
If a customer is being obnoxious you’re well within your rights to escort him or her out of the premises.
If a player or parent really doesn’t value what you do you can cancel their membership.
If the committee/club doesn’t care, maybe you need to find a different place to work.
If a coach isn’t pulling their own weight you need to tell them to buck up their ideas or even to let them go.
All these difficult decisions are legitimate and sometimes need to be taken.
I’m not trying to say otherwise.
But ideally they should come from a place of deliberation where you’ve thought them through before coming to what you think is the right decision.
In other words, you want to make proactive decisions as much as possible, instead of reactive decisions.
By reactive decisions I mean what happens when you take something personally and snap and end up going in a direction that maybe isn’t the right one for your business at that point in time.
Here’s a couple of examples to try and illustrate this point.
Let’s say that I’m a coach and I’m not getting on with the people that run the club where I operate my business from.
A snap, reactive decision would be to get angry with them, and maybe send a less-than-polite email in the heat of the moment and make a situation that was bad, 10x worse since now they really don’t like you and will make your life miserable going forward.
This might then lead you to have to rush to leave the club and end up settling on another club that is maybe less than ideal for your business.
A better approach to this situation would be to try and explain the reasons behind your dissatisfaction in a polite manner.
If that doesn’t help the situation and you get the sense that nothing will, then you create an exit plan.
Perhaps as part of that exit plan you research other potential venues where you could run your business from.
And once you’ve done your research and found something that works for you, you can move your business there in a much more organised and structured way, which will be much less disruptive to you and your customers and therefore your bottom line.
Now I appreciate that this is an oversimplification of a complex problem, but hopefully you get what I’m trying to say.
Here’s another simple example which is very real for me at the moment.
In my coaching business we run a 30-day trial for only £1.
Now, some people stay after the trial, and some people don’t. That’s expected and we knew that going in.
But still, it hurts when someone cancels. And since we’ve had this offer going for quite a while now, we’ve had dozens of people cancelling after their 30 days run out.
And if I’m being completely honest, on a bad day when we get 3 or 4 emails coming through of trialists cancelling their membership, for a split second I do question if we should keep doing it.
But then I remember that a bad day is just a bad day.
And making decisions based on a few cancellations is not the right way to approach this problem.
The right way to look at this problem is to actually track the conversion numbers and find out what is the percentage of people that stay and the percentage of people that cancel.
If that percentage is above what we think is acceptable then we should keep doing it and if it isn't then we should change it.
And so far the conversion has been way above what we think is acceptable, so we keep offering our £1 trial!
The day that it consistently falls below the acceptable threshold we’ll need to think of alternatives.
This is really simple, right?
But in order to get to this you need to be able to not take things personally.
And this is often easier said than done!
Ok, now the third thing that I’d suggest you do is to keep consistently selling your business to everyone involved.
And I obviously don’t mean to actually sell your business to a buyer for an agreed sum.
I mean sell as in communicate all the good things that you’re doing, to all the people that you’d like to care about your business.
Because sometimes people don’t care, simply because they don’t know the good that you’re doing for them.
Sometimes a good, solid, consistent PR campaign is all that you need to do to get more people on your side.
Find a way to communicate the positives regularly with all the stakeholders that you know play a part in helping your business move forward.
These will be your players and parents, your committee, the people that work with you and anyone else that you want to know what’s going on in your business.
Tell them about all your successes and make sure to involve them every step of the way.
Get them to a point where they feel like your successes are their successes.
Committing to this type of regular communication means that you’ll need something to communicate.
And this is an important point.
By forcing yourself to ‘report’ to everyone else you’re creating an accountability system for yourself.
Because at the end of the day people are not going to care if your business is being extremely successful if all that means is that you’re making lots of money for yourself…
Sure, that’s great for you, but why should anyone else care?
Hint: they shouldn’t and won’t!
So, that won’t work.
If you want people to truly become advocates of your business you’ll need to find things they care about.
For the committee that might mean getting them more members, for the parents that might mean successes in the children’s programme, for coaches and other staff that might mean financial incentive schemes, for the larger community that might mean financial support to local charities, etc. etc.
What you decide to do and communicate to them is up to you.
But the point that I’m trying to make is that you should create a PR system for your own business so that everyone else is aware of all the good that you’re doing.
Because at the end of the day, if they don’t know about what you’re doing then they really won’t care about it.
Ok, so let’s quickly recap:
No one will care about your business as much as you do. This is just a given and you need to make peace with it.
Learn to not take things personally. This doesn’t mean let everyone walk all over you. Of course not. But it means learning to step away when necessary and making decisions based on logic and long term goals, rather than in the heat of the moment.
Create a good communication system that allows you to sell what you do to the people in and around your business consistently. If they don’t know what you do, they most certainly won’t care about it!
I appreciate that this is a bit of an abstract topic, but I really think that it’s an important one to think about, which is why I thought it was worth recording an episode on it.
So, I hope it’s useful!
And that’s it for today’s episode. As always I’ll be back next week with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy podcast.
Until then and thanks for tuning in.