My most expensive lesson

What’s the most you’ve paid for education? Especially business education? 

My most expensive lesson came at an enormous cost - around half a million pounds. It wasn’t a course, a coaching programme or a consultation, but true lived experience that I’ll never forget.

I’ll set the scene.

Back in 2021, my business was flying. We had a phenomenal year. Revenue was up more than 200% from the year before, and profit just as much. It was just our third year of operation, costs were low and the market was good. We racked up a £300k profit, and I thought I’d cracked this whole business thing. From here, the only challenge appeared to be how quickly we could grow.

The next 12 months wouldn’t be quite what I expected.

I started investing our profits back into the company, hiring new people and upgrading to an office with 35 desks and meeting rooms - there were 8 of us at the time. We brought in experienced talent in sales, marketing and operations as well as brand new “rookies” that we felt had great potential. The place was buzzing, and optimism was high.

Unfortunately, one thing was missing. Sales didn’t follow the investments I’d made. Before long, morale began to dip. Our hard-won profits were disappearing at a rapid pace. We were rattling around in our big, empty office while I tried not to show the team that I was panicking.

But as the numbers in the bank account continued to fall, panic was exactly what I did. I tried sales incentives, harsh messages, supportive one to ones, training, coaching, increased marketing budgets, everything I could think of. Nothing worked.

I began, very clearly, to see the end. Every day, when I logged into our bank account (note to self - checking every day is NOT productive), I calculated how long I thought we had left. That number turned from months to weeks, and the company’s performance wasn’t getting any better. I thought we were done. We’d gone from that £300k in profit and absolute confidence to a £200k loss and complete confusion.

You might have heard this story before as the origin of my obsession with high performance culture, and it’s absolutely true that it started here. There was something else that had to change before I could recognise that as the way back, though. I had to shift my focus.

You see, each time I worked out how long we had left, it was all I could think about. I made all of my decisions from a defensive, cautious and downright fearful position. It was this, as much as anything else, that stopped the business from improving. In my obsession with survival, I’d completely lost track of what I actually wanted from the company. I couldn’t see a positive outcome, and without one to pursue, there was no way to turn things around.

So, before figuring out the culture, brand changes, or anything else. I pressed reset and wrote out what I wanted the result to be. I revisited why I’d started the company in the first place, and my vision for the future. I reviewed all of the clients we’d worked with and the impact we’d had for them, and imagined the scale at which we’d multiply that impact moving forward. I saw, for the first time in a long time, an outcome I wanted, made it as vivid as I could and grabbed hold of it desperately.

Only once I’d done that could I start to move towards a successful future and away from failure. Each time I faltered (and it happened more than once), I brought myself back to that vision and charted a path from here to there.

It didn’t take long for things to turn around. We had a solid January, a decent February and a very good March. There were ups and downs across the year, but in challenging conditions we made the necessary changes and moved back to profitability. 

As my career progresses, the lessons seem to get more expensive and more painful - I think that’s just the way it goes. This one, though, was perhaps the most important: you get what you focus on. No matter how bad the situation, if you can picture a positive result and keep it vividly alive in your mind, your chances of achieving it increase exponentially. Being aware of risks, downsides and potential consequences is essential. Putting them out of your mind while you work towards the future you actually want to build is the only way to be successful.

So, as you head towards the end of another year, take care of your focus. Wherever you put it is where you’re likely to end up.

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