Those six words are probably the most dangerous and damaging that any business can utter. Over the years, whether it's been at different agencies or suppliers, that mantra is the easiest way for businesses to fade into obscurity. Reading the world-renowned Seth Godin’s blog this week made me think of the truth he was speaking so clearly below:
That’s how culture perpetuates injustice and indignity. Because that’s just the way things are around here.
But the status quo isn’t permanent. The world doesn’t stay the way it was. It changes.
And it’s been changing faster than ever.
It doesn’t change because the status quo sub-committee had a meeting and decided to change it.
It changes when someone decides that the way things are around here needs to change, and simply and bravely begins to do something differently.
And then someone else follows along.
Yes, it bends toward justice. But only if we help. Only if we lead.
It resonates with me because it took me a while to realise in my previous life that my competitors weren’t the other CRM providers. The biggest barrier to our success was just intransigence. It’s a bizarre peculiarity of the human psyche that, so often, the bigger the decision that needs to be made, the more we procrastinate.
We see the biggest challenges the world faces today, things like climate change, and though it’s the biggest existential threat we have and like the famous frog in the pot, we’re at risk of boiling so slowly that most of us don’t realise it's even happening.
Think about it yourself, when you have your to-do list, do you go for those difficult tasks or deviate to the famously easy to achieve ‘low hanging fruit’? I know what my natural instinct is, and if I can knock out 10 easy tasks, I’ll get to the end of the day bemoaning the fact I didn't knock off the one difficult one I really needed to. I promise I’m not frog obsessed but books like ‘Eat That Frog’ emphasise this reality so well and give you coping mechanisms.
We see this on a weekly basis at Kerfuffle when consulting with agents who, rather than get the foundations of their business sorted by getting their CRM system in place, the right website or their EDM solution, all of which I’ve labelled for some time as the holy trinity of PropTech for a business. But no, rather than get this right, they would rather go for some of the shinier PropTech baubles that are out there and, on the face of it, easy to deploy.
Famously change is good, and change often feels uncomfortable at first. I think the thing to really calculate is the opportunity cost of not making the move. That really tends to focus the mind, also ensuring you can demonstrably point out the benefits to your team in the business so that it doesn’t just feel like another autocratic choice from above that needs to be gone along with. Show them the extra business and commission they can win, or the time-saving elements of a solution, and it becomes a much different picture.
One of the things I’ve been proudest of at Kerfuffle is that we can, without bias, give agents the confidence that they have made the right decision and the difficult initial experiences they are having are entirely normal.
