Here are a few thought leaders that I really like and I subscribe to get copies of their latest blog postings and thoughts. Seth Godin is one of them. Seth sent me the article below and it has great lessons for the party rental industry.
Seth writes: Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does.
Hard work is what the insightful litigator does when she synthesizes four disparate ideas and comes up with an argument that wins the case-in less than five minutes.
Hard work has a storied history. Farmers, hunters, factory workers… Always there was long work required to succeed. For generations, there was a huge benefit that came to those with the stamina and fortitude to do long work. Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate. I think it’s worth noting that long work often sets the stage for hard work. If you show up enough and practice enough and learn enough, it’s more likely you will find yourself in a position to do hard work. It seems, though that no matter how much long work you do, you won’t produce the benefits of hard work unless you are willing to leap.
I founded a party rental business on long work. After a number of years the long work caught up with me. I realized that due to the fact that I could only work a set amount of long hours each day, this would only serve to limit my earnings potential and take me away from all other parts of my life. My long work habit was consuming all of my time and I had nothing left for family, wife and friends.
Adopting the hard work of reinventing my business was indeed risky, but it paid off. The hard work in the party rental business is finding unique ways to become ultra efficient with all that is done. Because the business is a people intensive business; predictable results are hard, and a cost can get out of hand quickly. The hard work is looking at the entire operation to systemize, mechanize and develop procedures as much as possible. The result brings predictable quality and cost control to the business-and best of all gives the owner or manager freedom to earn more money and have more time to themselves.
We became so taken by the results of hard work that we sold the original rental business to spend our entire time studying the hard work of the party rental business. We freely share our ideas that cost nothing to implement and occasionally one of you buys a specialized machine we develop as a part of a larger system to serve a party rental business.
If you would like to see what Steve and the Teeco Solutions team are up to, check them out at www.teecosolutions.com