Business Flexibility Pays Off

Small businesses often start out as one thing and end up as something else. The successful ones, anyway. Flexibility in business is critical to your success.

Be flexible, not fickle

This doesn’t mean that you should be a chameleon from day one, taking on any and all projects that float by. That approach would violate the notion of picking a niche, formulating your positioning, and basing your messaging on that position.

What it does mean, though, is that you really need to be open to opportunities and subtle shifts in your target market. For one thing, just because you choose a niche, that doesn’t mean you got it right.

• You may have chosen a niche that was already in the midst of a transformation.
• You may have started with a skill or market you knew well, but as time went on you became expert in a related, but distinct skill or market.
• You may have entered a crowded competitive marketplace, but over time discovered a lucrative offshoot.

If you’re not flexible about changing your focus and your outbound communications, you could find yourself stuck in a backwater market, with nary a paddle, let alone a boat to get back into the heavy current.

Flexibility exercises

Here are some ways to remain flexible:

Ask questions—Your clients and prospects know where things are headed before you do, even if they can’t always articulate the direction clearly. Ask lots of questions, write down the answers and regularly review what you’re hearing.

Read outside of your market—Don’t allow yourself to become so tightly focused that you don’t pay attention to niche markets, technologies, and trends outside your niche. Read widely in trade journals, on blogs, on news feeds, in magazines.

Pay attention to your gut—Strangely, this one is hard for many people. We don’t often trust our intuition. For example, I have a sort of negative intuition when it comes to technology trends. That’s probably because I’m not the target demographic for most new technologies. As a consequence, I’ve had to train myself to listen to those little negative thoughts that crop up when I see a new technology:

• “Why would anybody play games on a cell phone?”
• “Who on earth would spend all day text messaging?”
• “Why would you want to sit around looking at satellite photos of your own house?”

Now when I hear myself saying things like that, I pause, take a deep breath, and take note of the technology that currently strikes me as silly or useless. Chances are that it’ll be a big hit and we’re just now on the cusp of that technology’s boom.

Some of you might be lucky enough to have the normal type of intuition, in which you automatically realize how successful something will soon be. If so, that’s great! Take advantage of it.

Write it down—Write everything down. I sound like a broken record on this, but it is a critical task that you must learn. A friend of mine is transcribing a travel journal she wrote several years ago. She mentioned to me that at least half of what she’s now reading is completely new to her, though she wrote it herself. Not only did she forget many of the details of her journey, but she had revised many of those travel details in her memory, to be something they never were. It’s a perfect example of the frailty of our memories. Write it down, then review it!