Happily driving along one day, your car dips into a pothole. The subsequent clanking tells you there’s a problem and you limp into the nearest tire center. Mechanics put the car on a hoist and you retire to the cold, drafty, poor excuse for a reception area. Fortified by a ghastly machine-made cup of something, you start reading a magazine article on the problems of disposing of used tires. They can’t be burned and they shouldn’t become landfill. Only so many are needed to be protection around motor race circuits or to be chained together to create artificial reefs in the sea. Minced up, they make a safe landing for children’s play areas, but it doesn’t use that many to do all play areas length and breadth of the country. Sure, some are remolded into new tires, but you can only do the remolding a few times before the whole tire is past reuse. So there are lots of unloved used tires accumulating in vast stacks around the planet.
Then, your Eureka moment arrives. You decide minced tires with a suitable binder/setting agent would be an excellent pothole filler, flexible yet strong, and not subject to deterioration in the cold. The only problem you have at the research stage is finding someone who will supply the small quantity of minced tire you want for your experimentation—multiple truckloads no problem, a couple of sacksful—umm problematic. A nearby, pot-holed, quiet piece of road provides a good proving ground for the Rube Goldberg output from your garden shed. You eventually find the right recipe and want to start selling.
Everyone thinks it’s a great idea, but nobody wants to take it on, unproven. Finally, you persuade your local town council to let you mend their holes for free as a reference for others and, hey presto, snowball effect, after the next winter you have a fleet of trucks with your name on and a bigger gang of workers, earning you substantial sums nationwide.
A big construction company comes sniffing around. Their acquisitions director says they’d like to make you a wealthy man and take the business off your hands, if only, of course, post purchase, you’ll stay on and run it for them. You think you can do better on your own.
But then revenues start to fall. You have filled in the largest potholes and they’re not recurring, so work is dropping. You decide to hire a guru who, after much procrastination and no little expense, says “license the technology internationally,” and there followed a sudden fillip in income, as royalties—mainly from Scandinavia—come rolling in. The next guru you hire says “diversify,” so you take your best workers and set them on trialing whether the same product would provide good insulation if formed as house bricks.
You attend a routine management meeting. To your surprise, your local manager reports that without the best workers, the rest of the labor gangs are threatening strike action. The international manager advises that an obscure Japanese company is going to sue you for breach of their patent on a similar product. Your production manager tells you that when a road is to be resurfaced and the old surface heated to remove it, your filler burns and gives off toxic gasses. As a result, Health & Safety are threatening a criminal prosecution.
Should You Stop, Change, or Grow?
It doesn’t matter if you started your own business, acquired it, inherited it, or somehow it landed in your lap. It doesn’t matter if your business invented a better use for tire chips, or is a catering business, recruitment business, or fitness gym. Maybe you’re in retail or wholesale. Or the business installs any variety of equipment into other business or residential premises. Perhaps it is some form of real estate or construction activity. There again, is it some form of professional, consultancy or service business? Or you develop online games, develop apps, have an online matching engine of some sort, or you provide training or education (online or offline). Whatever your business, you’ll find many gems in this book either in the form of direct recommendations or posed as questions to trigger your curiosity to generate your own solutions—which we trust will be better.
The book is ordered Stop, Change, Grow. Stop is those little adjustments you might make at a red stop light or at a pit stop—like turning the wipers off. These adjustments should free up resources, time, mind-space, and make the experience of driving that much better. Change is where you might make minor like for like changes. Like changing that punctured tire. We think of these as resource neutral. Grow is like change of direction along a road you may very well have never travelled before, but with some confidence it will get you there. Or more like moving from a sports car as a happy bachelor to the family SUV to match your new responsibilities in life, knowing the two-seater will never again be part of you. The car swap may start with reluctance and apprehension ahead of delight with joy as you settle into the differences that come with the new car.