‘Is there anything going on in your business affairs today, that KNOWING WHAT YOU NOW KNOW, you wouldn’t do again if you had to start from scratch?’
In times of rapid change and turbulence there is always at least one answer to this question.
The most common answer has to do with people, both personal and business relationships.
Very often the answer is directly related to an employee, partner or a third party providing some form of online or offline service.
So a more pertinent question to ask would be,
‘If this person / company re-applied for this post today, KNOWING WHAT I NOW KNOW, would I hire them for this task at this level of responsibility and pay?’
If the answer is no, then the next question to ask is,
‘How do I get rid of them, and how fast?’
or if you’re in an unwanted partnership,
‘How do I get out, and how fast?’
This process of hypothetical questioning is called zero based thinking, and the resultant actions require one key personal quality to see them through – COURAGE.
As Margaret Thatcher said,
‘Courage is the key quality at the sticking point’
And Winston Churchill once said,
‘Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend’
One of the most important places where we need courage is in confronting unpleasant people situations.
Something you will have to do over and over again, alas, is to realise you made a mistake when you hired a particular person, got into a relationship or began a partnership.
Another situation where you will need to pluck up some courage is when dealing with problem patients.
New Aesthetic start-ups in particular are eager to get any business they can, and so at some point they take on a patient from hell.
The patient complains, the patient is demanding, the patient is rude, the patient is slow to pay, the patient is someone they wish they hadn’t acquired at all.
So what you can do in this instance is start to fire your problem patients. There are two ways you can do this,
1) Raise their prices very high. They will just go away and there will be no hurt feelings.
2) Tell them you can’t give them the level of service that they deserve, and encourage them to use your competitors (and hence ruin your competitors’ lives!)