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Is there a nail in the tire of your business?
By Martin Avis
Its a familiar story - a nail in my car tire spelled an expensive trip to the shop. But my conversation with the owner sparked some interesting thoughts.
The guy told me 'You're actually quite lucky the tire deflated so you could see you had a problem.'
Odd thing to say, I thought. 'Don't tires always go down when they get a nail in them?'
'Not by a long way,' he said, 'In an awful lot of cases the hole seals itself around the nail or screw and the driver doesn't know anything about it until he has an accident.'
I had to press that one further.
It turns out, according to the tire guy, that many cars drive quite happily with a nail or screw embedded in them until the driver is on a freeway, doing speed, and the heat from the road increases the pressure inside the tire.
At that point, the nail can often be popped out and the car experiences a sudden blow-out.
If the driver is lucky he gets to the side of the road, but if not ... well we don't want to go there.
My tire guy reckons that up to 40% of all high speed blow outs are caused by objects coming out of tires rather that new things going in!
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He said, 'People always blame the road for their problems, but a lot of the time they've been carrying the problem around with them for months. They just didn't realize it.'
That tire guy should have been a philosopher! That's exactly the same as with failures. Almost everyone blames outside forces - the customers are awkward, the markets are bad, the goverment doesn't care, the economy is shot to pieces, but they ignore the fact that most of these outside problems are navigated successfully by other businesses.
If you or your are experiencing a problem right now, try looking for the nail in your own tire rather than blame the ones that may or may not be in your path.
Look inside yourself or your to see where you may have weaknesses that need to be addressed and don't leave them until internal pressures make them explode.
A lot of businesses, either formally or informally conduct regular reviews of their business, but most of the time those reviews focus on how outside events can be better handled. And that is good.
Business must have strategies in place to deal with difficult customers, or adverse publicity, or unexpected changes in market conditions.
But the really successful businesses and people also conduct regular inward-looking reviews where they consciously look for areas that could explode under pressure.
A regular internal review can't often find the nails in your tires long before the pressures of life turn them from a potential problem to a high speed skid and crash.
Martin Avis publishes the acclaimed 3x-weekly email newsletter Kickstart Today - an eclectic mix of business advice, personal development, Internet marketing and unrestrained opinion. Subscription is free from www.kickstartdaily.com
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