Four Regrets You're About to Have

Blair predicts when we are through the COVID-19 pandemic and business is approaching normal (whatever that means), agency principals will look back with some regrets about the things they did not do, rather than the things they did.

Links

"Four Regrets You’re About to Have" by Blair Enns

"Play the Game of Constraints" by Blair Enns

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, today, I am going to interview you on something, but let me introduce this a little bit to our audience. If you've been listening for a while, you probably noticed that we alternate. We don't always publish them in the right order, but when we record them, we alternate. I'll come up with a topic and Blair will then interview me on it and throw some of his thoughts and then we reverse that.

Today, I'm going to be interviewing Blair on the four regrets that you might have and if this goes well Blair, I'm really hoping that this furthers your career as a motivational speaker because this topic is so motivational the four regrets you might have. Is this the best you could do? [chuckles]

Blair Enns: I live in a little village in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. People here don't understand what I do. The big question I get is, "Oh, I hear you're a motivational speaker." My reply is, "No. I'm more of a demotivational speaker." Yes, this is right in line with that.

David: [laughs] Now, this one interested me whether I should or I shouldn't, I've always read your blog and emails. This one was a recent one, and I was really glad when you suggested that we talked about this one, because I too, thought it would be a fantastic candidate for this, but it's not just because of the time that we're living in. This is the second quarter of 2020, but it's an evergreen topic because you see this all the time, in our own personal lives and the lives of our clients, and in their business lives, how they might have certain regrets.

I got to tell you before I turn you loose here, I wrote these Twitter posts that I think got more leverage than anything else I've written the last year, and it was about not being too hard on yourself because you suddenly think you have all this time to do more things. What you're saying, in essence, is you don't necessarily have more time, but this would be the perfect opportunity to prioritize some things. What introduction you want to give to this before I interview you on these four things?

Blair: Thanks for that. Well, I think regrets are actually something that I've thought about quite a bit insert your joke here.

David: You have no idea how difficult it is to just shut up. Let's just skip over this part, shall we? [laughs]

Blair: Probably because I don't allow myself many, and it's probably a character flaw I'm probably fragile in some way, but I've long believed that like regrets are for the things that you don't do. I do let allow myself regrets over action that I did not take, but I don't assign too much regret to things that I did because I think action yields information. You do something you learn, "Okay, that wasn't the right thing to do." There's a lesson there. You move on. There's almost never a lesson in not taking action, and that's part of the regret.

I think regret is saved for the things that you don't do, and I think when we're through this COVID pandemic, and we're back to whatever normal is, and so businesses humming, people are gathering people are traveling. That's what I mean by normal. I don't necessarily mean the old normal, but when we're back to whatever normal is, I think we're going to look back at the time that we did have off and not that I'm so busy right now. I don't feel like I've got a lot of extra time, but I've heard a lot of people say to me, they've got time right now.

Somebody said it to me again, yesterday, lots of time in my hands. I think we're going to look back with regrets on the things that we didn't do. You have two kids, I have four kids. It's been awhile ago since our kids were young, but when you have your first child, you have this reaction, which is like, "Oh my God, what did I do with all my free time back when I didn't have kids?" Do you remember that?

David: Yes, I do. Part of it is you're busy taking pictures and doing things with them, and by the fourth one, you're not taking any pictures unless somebody a neighbor did or something [crosstalk], you just completely change your life for that first one.

Blair: Yes, the first one you think, "Oh, my God back when I didn't have kids, I had all this free time." Then you have your second kid, and you look back and think, "Man, what did I do with all my free time when I only had one kid?" Then it changes after it just gets blurry after two. I think that's what we're going to look back at, we're going to look back and think, "Oh, I could have done some things. I should have done some things, and I didn't."

David: Here, we are getting ready to talk about these four things. I'm thinking about a call I had on the way here talking with a PhD researcher from Toronto, wanting to devise a completely new product that I would use for my clients and my prospects and I was so excited after that phone call, not even knowing how much this is going to cost. Thinking about how this is not something I typically would have thought about before. Anyway, I love this topic. Let's dive into it. Therefore, the first one that you've talked about, here we are on the busiest Friday, both of us have had a long time, and the first future regret you're trying to avoid, hopefully, is I should have taken more time off. Why is it that people aren't taking-- You're not talking about traveling because sometimes they can't travel, but why aren't they taking more time off and what might keep them from doing that?

Blair: We're always on. I think many of us are still in crisis mode. I feel like, emotionally, I'm through crisis mode. I can tell by my alcohol consumption.

[laughter]

David: It's back down to normal?

Blair: Yes, it's back down to nothing. I don't believe that everybody's through crisis mode, but I think when we're in crisis mode or even the uncertainty, the uncertainty has us on edge. Even if we're not busy, we're always on. We're looking for the next signal. The signal that everything's going to be okay, or that we're about to head off over the cliff edge.

I think even if you're not actually doing a lot, you're always mentally on, you get up in the morning, you're checking your email and communications, waiting for something to drop. I'm making generalizations here about how busy people are and acknowledging that some people are actually quite busy, but I think for the majority, you have more time on your hands than you did two and a half months ago.

I think the reason we're not taking time off is just we're waiting. We're in constant expectation mode. The three regrets we'll talk about, as I mentioned in my article. For you to not have those other three future regrets, you need to be in a pretty good mental health space today to make decisions. I see a lot of people who are stressed.

I'm not saying that time off is the answer because, for a lot of people, you can't go anywhere, but not going somewhere, not working or thinking deeply about work, those are two different things. You can have a staycation. You can unplug electronically. Even if it's just a series of long weekends, three or four day weekends, if you don't feel like you have the ability to take a week off, but I think that's the first thing that we're going to regret is that we didn't take time off.

David: There's this weird thing happening, especially with firms that weren't working remotely before this happened. They had to dive in and they've made some weird decisions to account for the fact that this is new and to cover that up. One of the things that they're doing is they're spending way too much time on the video side of Zoom, which requires a different level of energy. It sucks more out of you than just being on the phone sometimes.

Then, of course, there's also the element of working from home. Maybe you have a spouse there, maybe you have dependents there, and all this is wearing you out to a different degree, and you aren't able to leave home as much as normal. I would guess you don't get much argument about this from our listeners, but they probably want to know how do I pitch this to my team and still not violate the sense that we're all in this together. Maybe the idea is that we need to be facilitating more time off for our team as well, not just for ourselves.

Blair: I agree with that completely. I think it's not just about you. It is just about your team. Your team is going through the same kind of shock, and again, we're through the shock, but on edge, I'm not sure about the future of their role. They're the stresses of working from home. I realized recently that I've got a bunch of kids at home, but they're all adults for the most part, so I quit parenting years ago.

They're just roommates for the most part. I realized that I haven't properly acknowledged or even understood the complexities that team members face who are working from home, even though some of them work from home every day, but now their kids are at home and their kids are young in school-age and the complications in their life because that hasn't been a complication in mine.

I've been really slow to acknowledge that. I'll say I'm the only one that win without pitching working today. Everybody else is off today. We're trying to do that, or I'm trying to encourage people to take time off, and I'm trying to take time off. Although, I'm not doing such a great job. I said to somebody on a podcast earlier, I said, I worked three, 12 hour days last weekend, and then I stopped and realized, "Oh, yes, there are only two days in a weekend." Time isn't real anymore, is it? Time is so funny right now.

David: One of the things that I really liked in this section in the article was you said you're waiting for the big shift of when things snap back to normal, but the big shift is likely to be slow and still far away. That was part A to me and part B was, "Oh, I get it. What he's saying is, we need to be working in a way that is sustainable into the indefinite future." We can't be trying to sustain a certain energy level, like holding our breath, knowing that we're going to have to surface it at some point. No. Assuming this is the way it is into the indefinite future, are you on a sustainable pace?

Blair: Yes. That's a great way to put it. I think I've said previously that we're making decisions in our business based on the assumption that I'm not traveling anywhere for 18 months. If you're suspending or putting off taking time off now, is that sustainable for 18 months? What are you going to do when things get back to normal and you're busy again? Are you all of a sudden going to take time off? No, you're not. If you don't take it now, you're not going to get it for a while.

David: Yes. Okay. This is such a great point. You said a minute ago that the other three are predicated on doing this first one, about taking time off, and predicated on managing that well because it's going to be difficult to do these next three. Number two on the list, the future regret we're trying to avoid is, "I should have produced some content or built my audience in some ways." All under the lead generation umbrella. Why is this important enough to make your list of the top four?

Blair: Well, I think you and I know so many agency principals, David, who have a plan to write that book one day, and the number one reason they're not writing it today is, "I just don't have the time today, but at some point, I'm going to find the time. I'm going to take a long vacation or sabbatical or drop some other responsibilities and fit it into my schedule." I'm enjoying being provocative and saying to those people, and I know a lot of them are listening, yes, if it didn't happen during the pandemic, if you didn't get started or make significant progress, it ain't happening. Just accept that that dream is dead.

David: Here's the motivational speaker.

[laughter]

I got an email from a client of mine. He finished up his book and he's now shopping the best method to publish it, promote it, and I'm just so proud of him. It's like, "Wow. It's 128,000 words. He started a while ago, but he's put so much work into it during this time." It's not just a book. It could be a regular cadence of blog or insight pieces, or it might be your career as a podcast guest or as a podcast host. Whatever it is that you're doing to build your audience, whether it's a book or not, is the kind of thing that you don't want people to look back on this time and regret that they didn't do more of it.

Blair: In my business as a YouTube channel, I approved this at the beginning of the year. My team's been pushing me for a while. I said, "Okay, fine. We're going to do it." I'm the bottleneck in everything in my business. It's like, "Yes, I don't have time. I don't have time." Well, out of excuses. It's happening at some point. It's going to be a shit show in the early days, but it's happening. It's not just the book. It's all forms of content.

If you've lost clients, if your client roster has been decimated or a bunch of clients have put stuff on hold, and you can't do anything for your clients, now is a really great time to channel that energy into helping even more. Rather than helping the 10 or 20 clients that you have, try to help hundreds or thousands by getting some content out there that's valuable today, that's in your area of expertise, that builds your reputation, that builds your audience. It's a great time. If it's not a revenue-generating time right now, it's a great time to be audience generating.

David: Right. If you want to pursue this as a listener, you could also search through some of the previous episodes. One of them we talked about this, and was the Drop and Give Me 20 one as well. I love this one, and it's really near and dear to my heart. It helps people mentally as well. When they feel like there's too much fog in the future, they feel like they don't have as much control over their business, one of the ways to deal with that is to be doing the right things. Then at night, you're lying in bed, and you still don't see things any more clearly, but there is a sense of satisfaction that you've done what you could. This is a wonderful part of doing what you could.

David: You ready for number three?

Blair: Yes.

David: All right. "I should have upgraded my own or my team's skill set." This one surprised me a little bit. Talk about, maybe at some point, if you could give us some examples of what they might do as well.

Blair: Well, I'm glad you asked, David, because I own a training company.

David: Oh, shoot. I didn’t mean--

[laughter]

Blair: This is a little bit self-serving, but we just launched a pricing creativity boot camp. There's 20 participants from all around the world. We had the orientation not too long ago. People are introducing themselves and I asked them to speak a little bit about what's your situation with COVID. Of course, just like you're hearing, there's just a range of circumstances that people are dealing with.

Some firms are thriving and winning new business, and some firms at the other end of the spectrum, their client base is frozen or dried up. I'm always surprised at the number of firms that aren't experiencing total gridlock, but there are firms out there like that. I heard from a few in this last group who said, "Yes, you know what, our clients aren't active at all right now. I've got time on my hands. I thought now's a good time to invest in training."

One point of view, the point of view of somebody who owns a training company is you should invest in training at this point in time. Another point of view, the point of view of somebody who wants to conserve cash is I'm not investing in paid training at this time. To those people, I would say, the principle stands. If you're willing to go look for it and find it, there's so much free online training out there in the form of just YouTube videos or inexpensive online courses, more inexpensive.

Ours start at $2,000. There are $49-courses out there depending on what skill sets you want to upgrade. Is it project management? Is it knowledge about your client's domains or areas of expertise or vertical markets? Is it winning new businesses, and negotiating? Pick a skill set that you want to improve and then you can take this on an individual basis. You could reach out to your people and say, "Hey, we've got some time, you're still on payroll. You're not all that busy. Let's take advantage of this to improve your skill sets." Then allocate a budget. If the budget has to be zero, that's fine.

Have it be zero and just say to your people, "Can you let me know what one or two skills you think it makes sense for you to try to upgrade over the next few weeks? Then can you give me your recommendation?" Go find the courses. Go find the curriculum online, even if it's just videos or blog posts or whatever. Have your people put together a bit of a professional development plan over a short period of time over the next couple of months, and assign a budget to that even if the budget is zero.

David: There's so much to think about there. I couldn't help but think about, in that vein, something that you and I have talked about. I remember it was one of the more emotionally charged episodes where we stopped a little bit actually and asked each other what it was that motivated each of us.

One of the things that both of us felt the same about was central, must be this idea that you're constantly learning. A skeptic could step back and ask, "What's the role of upgrading our team skill set for instance? Is that going translate into more pricing or whatever?" It's not always about higher pricing. It's about just remaining interested as a human.

Also, if we translate this to your team, it's about making your firm a different place to work where the people who come to you, they come to you because your firm has the reputation as a place that builds careers. You draft a player, and you then know how to coach them up. I can see how this would expand as well. There really is so much out there.

I'm affiliated with a whole bunch of professional speakers whose careers have basically stalled. Most of those folks have been offering free training, free speaking. I'd know of somebody I talked with earlier this week, who normally charges $30,000 per episode who's doing these free right now. There's even more good stuff out there now than there usually is.

Blair: Yes, there's a ton of it. Just like the access to free information from a learning point of view, it's just everywhere. Man, it's everywhere free or cheap.

David: The fourth regret that you're hoping people would avoid, you phrased it like this, "I should have updated my whether it's strategy or positioning or business model for the new reality." Underneath this, is there an assumption that some of the changes that you might make to your business if your listener, would have a permanent place that even though we don't know what those changes are, you are assuming here that there will be changes that are somewhat permanent that need to be reflected in their business model?

Blair: I think so. Again, somewhat permanent. There's a lot of maneuver room in there, but just look at what you and I are doing in our businesses in the conversations we've had over the last few days. We're both like investing heavily in technology so that we can virtualize our services. The stuff that we used to travel to do, we're enjoying spending money buying technology, and we're both pretty excited about outfitting our workspaces so that we're able to more effectively do this. I made the decision to do this, and I think I talked about this in a previous episode. I just woke up Monday morning and went, "You know what, I'm not getting on a plane this year or next year." We're going to make assumptions, and I hope I'm wrong. God, I hope I'm wrong.

David: Your family hopes you're wrong too.

Blair: Yes, everybody hopes I'm wrong. We're making business decisions on the assumption that that's the way things are going to play out. That means we've got to change how we deliver some of our-- Some of our stuff has always been online, but the other stuff, we've got to change how we deliver it. We're making investments that probably we wouldn't make if I thought this was going to be back to normal in a couple of months. I think you're doing the same thing.

David: Yes. AT&T was out at the property yesterday. They're putting a 2.4-mile fiber optic line dedicated to the house. They are, literally.

Blair: I think I'm investing in technology. I buy some stuff, and my wife, who's my business partner, says like, "What did you just buy?" It's like, "Well, you should see what David's buying."

David: It's going to be a live four-switch video studio. It's going to be nice. It's something I've wanted to do forever, but it just didn't seem like I would use it enough. Now, I'm really excited about doing this. I'm past that panic phase as well. Although I find myself panicking for some of the people that I'm speaking with on the phone and it just is so all over the place. I talked with a firm this morning who's only down about 10%, and then yesterday talked with a firm that's down 80%.

It is just all over the place. More than just business model, their strategy, positioning are the things that these principals might want to change? Were the hints of those in their heads before all this hit, and it's just a matter of validating and acting on it, or is there just lots more new information that they should take into account? I'm just curious about what it is? Is it new information or is it more an impetus to make some of the decisions that they kind of thought they should have made earlier?

Blair: I think when it comes to fundamental positioning of the agency, like reframing or moving the discipline you're in and or the market you serve, the conversations that we're having with agency owners are it's like, "I'm not repositioning to get away from my current focus target market because this market is particularly hard hit. I'm thinking about my positioning now because I should have done it years ago." Under the banner of we've got time now to invest in these things.

That's what I'm seeing of the agency owners who are revisiting their positioning. I wrote strategies/positioning /business model. To me, strategy is positioning. They're tied to each other. One's an expression of the market viewpoint on your strategy, I guess. Business model is different. Business model, I think more about delivery model, unit economics, like, what is it that you're pricing?

I'm seeing a lot of firms who are not changing their disciplines or their markets, but they're changing maybe some adjacencies in their disciplines, doing slightly different things, but delivering them in new and different ways. To me, that's the really interesting stuff. In this article, we're talking about four regrets. I also reference the article that you prodded and kicked me to write.

David: Yes, the one about constraints.

Blair: The game of constraints. In this article, I refer back to that one. That's an article where I say, "Well, here are five or six different games that you can play where you reimagine your business operating under this constraint." Those constraint-driven exercises are really valuable in helping you think through different ways in which you might deliver your services.

David: I really endorse all these four, for sure. Is there another one that I would add to this? It might be as the people already thinking about turning the corner again, and I see too many of them wanting to add things back that they stripped away, either expenses or people or services or whatever, they're just reverse peeling the onion, as they're envisioning that this is what they'll do when they have enough interest from clients again, enough money coming in.

I would hope that instead of doing that, they would think about how to rebuild it from scratch, and not just rebuild it the way it was before with all the unnecessary stuff. Here's an example of what got me thinking in this direction. In my country, in the US, we have all these federal regulations that build, and every year, the legislature, when they're in session, they add lots more laws, and they hardly ever look at the unintended consequences of old ones.

Blair: It's like Windows 95. It's just code on top of code, on top of code, right?

David: Right. Now they've suspended. I was listening to a podcast yesterday and something like 260 of those Federal Regulations have been suspended temporarily. I'm just sitting here thinking, "Well, that's really good. Why don't we just keep them suspended? Why do we need them in the first place?" Things silly as, can nurses from Canada work in North Dakota or Detroit? Or can you get alcohol delivered to your home? From the ridiculous to the really important.

Blair: Do you need to be certified to braid hair in Georgia?

David: You probably do.

Blair: There is a state where you need to be certified to braid hair for money.

David: There is, really?

Blair: I don't know if it's Georgia. Yes.

David: More useless information for you listeners. Let's not just rebuild things the way they were. Let's think about how we would do this from scratch knowing what we know now, how do we create a more nimble organization in the future. I would want people to not have that regret I suppose. You didn't really ask me that question. This is a self-interview where I'm asking myself and then I'm answering. I'll let you know when you can talk again.

Blair: [laughs] It was on my list to ask you. I think that's a great point. How often have you played the game of, if I had to do it over again? Well, view this as the opportunity to do it over again, you get a chance to a certain extent to rebuild your business. Shannon, our director of coaching said to me, I think it was the end of last week, she said, "Okay, I had our fifth clients say to me, I am not going back to my space. I'm not either renewing lease or going back at all. Basically, this is now a distributed agency." That's an opportunity to rethink things on one level. There's so many different levels or aspects on which you can think about doing business differently.

David: This is such a great topic. I really enjoyed interviewing you on this. Thank you for putting some thought into this. When's your next good article going to come out? Is it 2021? Can we expect another one this year?

Blair: I think I've already written more since the COVID pandemic. You're pretty good at publishing every week but I've written more in terms of blog posts during the pandemic than I probably did all of last year. I'm working on a massive one. I'm going to break it up into at least two pieces. I've promised this article before, it's the inefficiency principle. The reason I didn't write it as I have a whole bunch of notes on it and scribblings on it and I thought, maybe it's a book so I've been holding it back. Whether it's a book or not remains to be seen. It probably isn't. It's a catch-all where I'm going to address two topics that I've discussed before in more detail. This idea of efficiency and innovation being mutually opposable objectives. I'm going to talk about how that principle or problem rears its head in agencies in the first part. In the second part, I'm going to talk about how it rears its head as a series of problems on the client side particularly when it comes to my good friends in procurement.

David: Pricing and all that. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Blair, good discussion.

Blair: Thanks, David. Talk to you next time.