If you’ve been at your business for a while, you’ve probably had the thought more than once – boy, if I were doing this over, I’d definitely do X differently (or not do X at all!).
No business ever moves in a straight line or knows exactly what it’s going to be when it just starts out, even after just a year or two.
In my experience though, very often owners are reluctant to make big changes (or just what may seem like big changes) to their businesses once they get going. Even if they have clear evidence it would be better if they did!
This is one reason I’m a big fan of naming things in a way that doesn’t lock you in – let your tagline do the work because that’s easier to change.
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Suppose, for example, you have an auto repair business, and you decided to call it Bob’s Foreign Auto Repair because at the time you knew Toyotas and Hondas really well. But you run into two problems. One is people with Mercedes keep calling, and you keep saying no. Two is you keep seeing how many people with Fords and GMs are looking for upgrade work, and that looks like a great profit center you know you’d be good at.
My first advice was don’t name your business in a way that limits you. If you were Primo Auto Service, you could do foreign and domestic and repairs and upgrades and the name wouldn’t be an issue.
But let’s say you did, and now you’re Bob’s Foreign Auto Repair. Is that really it? Nothing you can do? Of course not! For the cost of the sign change, buying a new domain name and some website and business card updates, inside a month you could be Bob’s Auto Service. You don’t even need a whole new sign, just one new word and some rearranging. Will this cost you any current customers? Very unlikely. But it will open you to other customers who never would have considered you.
There is a one-time cost to make this change, but how many new customers would it take to pay for that change? Not that many. But you’ll be getting more new customers for years. Yet this is the kind of thing I think a lot of business owners would decide was too much trouble or too big of a change to make. So they’d just deal with the reduced opportunity, never really considering what they were actually giving up.
So how to think about it in your own business? Easy. Just make a list right now of all the things you’d do differently if you were starting the same business over right now. What would you change about your services or pricing or customer profile or marketing or business segment or anything else? List it all, big and small.
Now once you have the list, the easy question is which of these are still things you could change? Chances are, almost all of them! So which ones should you change? Whichever ones you really think will make the business better. Start with the small, easy ones first, so that you can change them right away. Then work your way up to the bigger ones.
The beauty of being a business owner is we aren’t really stuck with the reality in front of us – we have the power to make changes and force it to be the thing we want. When you started, you had an idea, but as you went along, you realized some of your ideas wouldn’t work, and others had to make do with what you found along the way.
Now that you have the experience and can look back in hindsight, even just a few months or a few years, you can improve significantly. But only if you actually make those changes! So go ahead, make the list of things you’d do differently if you were starting your business over today, and then actually start doing them! It really can be just that simple.