Surviving Business Transition – Goals vs. Adaptability

I’m super pleased to share this guest blog post from Michael Martine, the Remarkablogger!  He continues our guest blogging theme of ‘business transitions’. By the way, I refuse to believe he’s as mean as he looks

Transitioning your business is tough. Look at the language we use to describe it: weathering the storm, surviving the changes, enduring, rough road, and the like. Transitioning your business is like attempting to transfer packages between two speeding trucks. You’re going to crack some china at the very least. To do it successfully, you have to dispell the false duality of goals vs. adaptability and understand how they support each other to have a successful business transition outcome.

Goals

Goals determine what your business is transitioning into.

We’re often told that we must have goals, and of course there’s no question of this. Absolutely, we must have goals. We all nod our heads and think everyone knows that. But can you name your top goals without hesitating? Most of us can’t. We’re operating with vague notions in our minds about what we hope to achieve, because we’re not clear about what we want.

If this is the case, you will then have difficulty establishing and meeting the shorter-term goals of a business transition. You must know your goals like you know your name. Then you can work backwards from your long-term goals, setting the short-term goals needed to reach the endgame.

Anyone with anything worthwhile to say about goal-setting will always tell you the same thing: write them down and go over them daily. I bet you’ve read this a million times. If you’re not doing it, then you’re just being stubborn in your self-sabotage. Please do this.

Adaptability

Adaptability determines how well you will transition your business.

Goals without adaptability are promises waiting to be broken. People create a plan and then abandon it the moment reality fails to match it. Adaptability without goals is just so much endless acrobatics with no payoff–we soon tire and burn out. Why people tend to treat goals and adaptability as mutually exclusive, I’ll never know. I guess we love our dualities. Truth be told, I’m more adaptable than goal-oriented (my greatest advances in business came when I created goals for it). Your goals aren’t likely to change, though they may if you find out new information which contradicts or supersedes your current understanding.

Adaptability is your ability to effectively overcome the challenges which arise on the way to meet your goals by changing your strategies and tactics until you succeed. Adaptability exists in how you reach your goals. Your path to reaching your goals is your choice and you’re free to change your mind without thinking it failure, as long as you arrive at your destination. Let me drag out that tired old cliche: the roadmap. As long as you know where you want to go, which road you travel is up to you. You may have to double back or take unexpected detours. Observe, decide, act, repeat as necessary.

This may seem counterintuitive, but adaptability requires a disciplined process. You need to establish a process for observing, deciding, and acting:

• What will you observe, and why?
• How will you make your observations? What instruments or tools?
• How will you know what the results of your observations mean?
• How will you make decisions? What are your criteria and values?
• Do you require the agreement and support of others for your decisions? How will you procure that?
• Do you need to delegate tasks to others? How will they get their instructions?
• What am I willing to do to achieve the goal?
• What am I not willing to do to achieve the goal?
• What am I willing to sacrifice to achieve the goal?
• What am I not willing to sacrifice to achieve the goal?

Example: Remarkablogger

I hope you don’t mind that I’m using my own business as an example, since it’s the one I know best. My blog consulting business has undergone transition in the past, and is undergoing it now. At first, what I did was more like freelance design and technical work: I installed and designed blogs for clients. I was a blog monkey. I transitioned from that to a business model of pure consulting. I now help business owners get the most out their blogs and overcome problems, and I do this over the phone.

However, I’m also in the midst of transitioning again to an information products business, where I’m selling my knowledge rather than my time. The consulting and the information product business can happily coexist for as long as I need them to, but eventually I will cease consulting.

These transitions are happening because I have specific goals to meet for income and personal freedom. Lesser goals exist for projects I’m working on. In meeting these goals, I’ve had to be adaptable and modify my strategies and tactics. Each transition moves me closer to my goals. These transitions are not responses to the economy or to problems, they are a shifting to a higher gear.

About the author: Michael Martine lives in beautiful Vermont, and is the author of Remarkablogger and WordPress SEO Secrets. Follow him on Twitter or join his network on LinkedIn.