Preparing for Change – 3 Ways To Find More Cheese

About ten years ago, I was working at an affinity marketing firm. From time to time, management would get all associates together in a large banquet hall for the all-employee meeting. You’ve been to those…free coffee and poppy seed muffins. Well, these meetings were often used to tell us how good (or bad) the company was doing and plans to right the ship. But, this particular meeting was different. We sat and watched an animated video about two mice and two people running through a maze looking for cheese. The two mice were always moving and always found the cheese. But the two people, once the cheese ran out, panicked and couldn’t figure out how to get more. They stood still and waited.

Who Moved My Cheese, a best-selling business book by Spencer Johnson MD, is not about cheese at all. It’s about change and how we handle it. As a small business owner, change happens and fast. The norm one day is stale the next and what’s deemed profitable one quarter, isn’t the next. I like to call it the whiplash effect.

But you know, change doesn’t have to break you. Sometimes it’s a good thing, especially if you keep these three things in mind…
1. Anticipate change. Do your homework. Be aware of the shake ups in your industry. Keep an eye on your competition. Set up Google alerts. Be proactive so you won’t be blindsided by sweeping changes. Be nimble and quick to react to demands within your market. You want to be a part of the wave when it moves so you’ll have a better chance of finding the shore when it settles down.

2. Prepare for change. Keep binders of internal processes and procedures that include action plans of things that can be done ‘just in case’. A big mistake many of us make is not documenting what we do, how we do it, and what can be done if something crazy happens. We like to hold that information hostage in our brains for some reason, never considering what would happen if that brain was absent from work one day.Take the time to write everything down, step by step, with print screens and everything! When the cheese starts moving, you or anyone else in your office now has a plan to go find it.

3. Embrace change. Business is a rat race. A maze full of twisty turns and dead ends. But, there is cheese in this maze and only those that lace up and pursue it will find it. Change will happen so go ahead and accept it. Look at the obstacles you face and create a strategy to overcoming them. But, you’ll never overcome them standing still. Get your head in the game and go find that cheese.

I’ll end with this…it was only after the cheese was gone did one of the men realize that not only had he stopped running, but he’d taken his running shoes off and was relaxing. He wasn’t ready to go find more after it was gone. Look down at your feet. Are you laced up?