How one tyre cost $500 (and other biz lessons)
This Sunday emails comes to you from Lucky Bay in Yallabatharra, about 30 minutes south of Kalbarri in WA. The bus has been parked here for 3 days as we meander our way towards more sunshine. Signal is intermittent at best, so if you get this email it’s by some small miracle 😅
It wasn’t an easy drive up, and just past Badgingarra (middle of nowhere, if you’re not familiar) we discovered that one of our bus tyres was disintegrating, leaving rubber all over the road. We were two hours from the nearest major town so we parked up and limped into Geraldton the next day to discover that one very rare replacement tyre would be $500.
But what was most interesting to me, was that the tyre fitter gave us an alternative to buying rare $500 tyres (if we could even find them on our travels). He suggested changing our rims to commercial truck rims and getting a larger truck tyre which very often came secondhand off road trains. We could replace all 6 wheels on the bus for just $400. It would also mean the bus revved lower to turn the wheels AND we’d conserve fuel.
It was a future proofing strategy.
There’s a great quote about entrepreneurship simply being the art of putting out fires. It makes me laugh because it feels so true. But maybe it’s also the skill of back-burning every season so those fires are less extreme.
Our insurance policies are like this. Contracts are like this. Waivers too.
When you start a business (unless you’re being guided by a professional) we tend to get started bringing in clients and growing our brand before we’ve build the systems and processes to support it. It’s not best practice of course, but it’s so very normal - especially if we’re growing a passion project or expanding from a hobby.
It might be selling your products wholesale without a wholesalers agreement. Or teaching clients without an indemnity waiver. Oops. We’ve all done it. But it’s not until a client disputes a contract, or a contractor steals your clients, that you realise something isn’t future proofed and water tight. You can’t prevent a blown tyre, but you can lessen the impact to your wallet (and the risk of being stranded).
Entrepreneurship requires the ability to put out those fires but then smart leadership means creating structures to prevent that happening again. Personally I like to imagine the worse possible scenario ever and then plan for that - fortunately for me I have an anxiety disorder so that comes easily to me! HAHA
We once had a client take us to consumer protection, over a contract term of 12 weeks that she had agreed to, but failed to read before purchasing. It was literally in bold on the payment screen. Naturally consumer protection had zero issues about throwing out the case, but it gave us cause to tighten down our terms, change the font, simplify the language, and make it even more obvious than before. We can't stop people from challenging our terms, but we CAN make it harder for people to miss them.
Covid too was a stark reminder to really get clear on cancellation policies for events and programs. Businesses had to balance compassion with keeping their business going. Most of us began with super flexible terms because we didn’t know what we were dealing with and quickly learned that if we gave an inch, some people would take a mile. Setting professional (and personal) boundaries was the learning curve that came with that experience, and many Covid policies were drawn up.
And here’s a fun fact I learned recently from James Clear called the power of tiny gains…. If you improve by 1% every day… by the end of the year you are 37 TIMES better at the end of the year, than when you started.
When something happens within our businesses, we feel the impact of it like a reflection of ourselves. If someone criticises our business, we feel criticised. The old adage “its not personal, it’s just business” is frankly a load of bullshit. Of COURSE it’s personal. You cannot separate the work that I do, from the entity I have built. You cannot put everything into starting a small business and keep everything “strictly professional” when a client challenges a contract you created or someone steals from you.
What we can do, is use each blow to our confidence or cashflow, as an opportunity to ask the following questions;
Could I have prevented this? If so, how?
Could I have responded better to the scenario when it played out?
What can I do now to reduce the chance of it happening again?
Is there anything else that might happen SIMILAR to this, that I need to act on now too?
The answers to all of the above could of course be
No
No
Nothing
No
Although I very much doubt they would be! 😅 Regardless, getting into the habit of really assessing what went down, either with your staff or just in quiet contemplation, gets you into the habit of noticing opportunity for improvement. Growth comes in these 1% moments, the tweaks and refinements, the realisations and the amendments.
1% ...I'm down for that.
And honestly, if I just paid $500 for one tyre, and in 12 months time I haven’t made the changes based on my experience & advice, and then end up paying $500 for the next tyre? Well y'all, that's 100% on me.
Have a safe and gorgeous week,
Kaye
