The “story” of a product or a service, what you choose to tell your client/the person you are talking to is paramount when trying to engage them through an emotional experience they need to be immersed into and feel they are the centre of in order to think, evaluate… choose.
To make my point clearer, I want to take advantage of this same technique with you and engage you by telling you the story of a personal experience I had while dealing with a client. I hope you will find useful elements and inspiration for your next business meeting in it.
To better understand what happened, let’s start by summing up the situation of this client of mine before he met me.
The client is a well-known electro-mechanical company, which has enjoyed prosperity and faced crisis. The owner suddenly misses and his son had to hand over the reign, who we can conveniently call “Stephan”.
Up until that moment, Stephan had worked in a completely different field and kept on the sidelines of his family company.
In the last few years, the company had accumulated great debts, also due to owner declining mental capacities and a faulty management. To cut a long story short, the company was slowly sinking because its foundation was crumbling down.
Stephan, who was facing this situation and wasn’t experienced in the management field at all, smartly decided to rely on competent external people to manage the company from a financial point of view and react to this crisis. He was well aware of the fact that the company needed to change its route and create a new company culture based on trust, passion and talent rewarding. This decision was exactly how we ended up meeting thanks to someone we both knew.
We set up a meeting. I let him tell me about his personal & company story. As we talked, I saw immediately that there were many elements the company was lacking: direction, positioning, brand, values, culture, purpose. They didn’t know where to start and where to go and the company was like a boat “trapped in a calm and windless sea”.
We defined and clarified those crucial elements. These were the first ideas we derived from the analysis:
- consultancy on an ongoing basis X days a month
- strategic plan + change management + Y days a month
to put into practice a strategy and the new company culture.
Stephan was now faced with a decision: innovate or keep on working on the daily issues which were taking time off the definition of his company purpose, direction and differentiation.
I fully understood the difficulty he was in, far as he was from being a company manager, and I told him this story to help him decide:
“Stephan, you are on the shore of this lake and, on the opposite shore, somewhere you don’t know precisely, there is the most important person in your life. They are sick and need immediate assistance within an hour.
All you have are a log and a branch you can use to row and get to the other shore, and you can’t swim.
What are you going to do?
You can decide to stay here, not helping them and letting them die or you can jump on the log and start rowing. You don’t know which way to go to get to your loved one and must make a decision on the route to follow. There is another risk you can’t ignore: if a strong wave hits you, you could fall and drown. And you wouldn’t save neither your loved one nor yourself.”
If you don’t go beyond what you see, own and know, sooner or later a wave will destroy your dreams.
I then told him, “I can offer you two alternatives for this scary situation:
- a rubber boat, a life jacket and a radar to find your loved one
or
- a fully accessorized motorboat, way faster than the rubber boat, and some friends to come along with you.
What do you choose? The rubber boat or the friends on the motorboat? Or do you want to risk?”
What was I trying to convey with this story?
My story wanted to make him quickly establish the situation he was in, its risks and the potential development, either positive or negative.
Promptly, he discovered he needed to:
- be aware of the direction your company must take to get to its goal (the loved one to be saved) having defined your purpose (share your lives together) in a world which is constantly evolving and where competition is always fierce
- have the right tools to get to your goal, reducing risks (choose the rubber boat or the motorboat or devise some other solution instead of rowing on a log)
- have the right skill set (swimming or knowing how to operate a boat) to define your strategy and efficiently put it into practice
- trust competent people who will give you the tools you need (alternatives, plans and skills which can generate value)
- Rubber boat: to define your company positioning (the route) to be competitive, differentiate, and grow
- Motorboat + friends: to define your medium-long term strategy + the management of the company culture change
How willing are managers, in the day-to-day reality of their company, to risk? In other words, are managers and business owners really aware of the risks and the opportunities they have before them? Are they really able to evaluate when a risk becomes a chance of evolution?
Many see innovation, taking a new path, like an element of uncertainty and, as a consequence, like a risk. But you need to think about this: if innovation means, on the one hand, taking risks it also means you can differentiate your business, make it prosper and grow. In the world we live in nowadays you can’t run away from this: either you innovate or you die.
The one element which really makes a difference in a company are the people who are open to change and are enlightened by modesty, wisdom, intuition, rationality and skill.
The difference which makes the difference is having a company culture aligned with your purpose.
These are the 4 elements which make up the essence of any company:
- Purpose
- Company culture
- Company and brand positioning
- Effective Execution
Choose the most suitable ride for the phase your company is in (start up, grow, impasse): not too fast, not too slow. If your vehicle is too fast, you risk hitting a wall, if it is too slow you risk never reaching your goal.
Augustus, in ancient Rome, was already taking advantage of the divergent thought: Festina Lente (which means “Run slowly”, in other words: act fast but carefully).
