I didn’t help Nike become Nike.
I helped my family’s distribution company.
It was epic. Here are ten things I wish I had known when we started:
1. Staying on offense. Even when you're losing sales or margins are falling, stay fighting.
Defensive thinking kills the energy and ambition you need to make a comeback.
2. Make agendas for every meeting. Keep the meetings short.
3. Do less thinking. Do more doing. Doing makes change.
4. Don't brainstorm. Observation of all the doing is the brainstorming. You will know what to do based on what you observe.
5. More doing. More listening. More great. Reading Good to Great and giving my team two-hour PowerPoint presentations about Good to Great never turned us from Good to Great.
6. Your team would much prefer you don’t lecture. Your team would much prefer fewer slides. Keep your talks under 20 minutes. Keep your deck to less than ten. Ask questions, shut up, and listen.
7. Technology won't save you or make you communicate better. Learning to collaborate as a team of human beings and create more disciplined processes, especially manual processes, makes you better. Doing things together, in person, on video calls, and with customers makes your communication better.
8. Clean data is the most essential part of any software implementation.
9. Spending $50,000 on redesigning your logo and website doesn’t create a better brand. Making handshakes mean something, doing what you say you will do makes a better brand. Word of mouth from happy customers makes a better brand.
10. Build what your customers want. Build what will help your customers. Spending $70,000 on a website portal to provide our customers with what I wanted them to have was monumentally selfish and stupid. It created a product that no one ever used and wasted our customers’ time when we tried to roll it out. Listen to your customers and build them what they want.
And there are so many more blunders to discuss.
What are your biggest learnings from the mistakes you’ve made?
Hope everyone is having a great week!!
John
Thanks to The Ad Professor for the find on the Nike ad. Best find all month!
#nike #smallbusiness #operations #whatinspiresme #failure #learning
Monday.com Expert - I Build Systems that Help You Achieve More
3moNo one does it like you guys. Getting to work with Nike's ex CMO is next-level! 😂 Really excited to see this!