Change is not a one-and-done experience for a growing team. Change is a rhythm.
Whitestone Branding soared from $1MM in revenue to over 1,000% growth, propelling them onto Inc. Magazine’s list of the fastest-growing companies, four times.
Jon Alagem and Michael Scott Cohen started Harper+Scott in 2014 and by 2022 were well over $50 million in revenue.
When COVID hit, Stephanie Taylor and Jamie Moore of hello promo went from concerns about their survival to recently hiring their tenth team member in a high-velocity turn-around.
Every fast-growth organization knows that change is not merely inevitable but ceaseless. Infrastructure changes, leadership changes, sales process changes: change is the rule, not the exception. The culture that adapts to evolutionary change is a culture that wins. It’s true in nature, it’s true in business.
And change is almost always the catalyst for growth.
But what prevents some distributors from adopting change?
We’ve conducted hundreds of interviews with successful distributors, distributors who outpace average industry growth by over 20%. In our work with customers we’ve identified one success-killing trait the successful promo team does not accept:
Successful people do not let self-limiting beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Self-limiting beliefs are far more than negative thoughts or doubts. Everyone has doubts. But self-limiting beliefs are deeper. Self-limiting beliefs are perceptions you hold that convince you of a (seemingly) incontrovertible truth – making us blind to the possibility that the belief is not only untrue, it’s dangerously self-fulfilling if you buy into it.
Self-limiting beliefs are half-truths. Half-truths that become convictions when they become a pre-excuse to change. Or as James Victore says inelegantly (but very effectively) in his book, Feck Perfuction: “we pre-shit on ourselves.”
“Words have power. The problem with repeating negative mantras to yourself is that you start to believe them. Then others believe them. Watch your words.”
Self-limiting beliefs that are specific to our industry:
It’s just too crazy to make any changes right now, let’s wait until things slow down.
We’re too busy to even think about this right now, let’s punt this to another season.
We don’t have enough bandwidth for this project yet.
Our team hates change and won’t buy this - at all.
Our team is too ____ (fill in the blank: old; young; busy; inexperienced) for this next evolution.
We don’t have the right people for this in place just yet.
We don’t have the right capabilities for this project.
We don’t have the right infrastructure at the moment.
Maybe we’ll consider switching (replacing, improving) in the fall.
We’re just not big enough to work with that type of client.
We don’t know enough about this to sell it yet.
I’m not smart enough to call on that buyer.
I’m not creative enough to work with that type of account.
The supply chain is such a mess, there’s no way we can handle that right now.
Mark Freed is the Executive Chairman at Genumark, the largest Canadian-owned distributor of corporate branded merchandise and one of the largest in North America. In a recent skucast episode where Mark was retiring and handing over the CEO reins to Mitch Freed, we asked Mark, “Like many of us looking back at our business journey, there are probably things you would do differently, what would you encourage entrepreneurs NOT to do?”
Mark’s encouragement: don’t delay.
“Make your decision and then hit go. I think the times where we got in trouble is when we knew what we were supposed to do and we just let it sit. Whether that was a process [change], whether it was personnel, or whether it was a great client fit. Do your work. Figure it out. And move on. Because it’s a fast-paced world out there and you gotta really keep it going.”
