Ep 485: Cultivating Curiosity for Professional Growth with Tony Harris

Sean: Now, I want to put a little twist in our conversation and ask you, were there some people who in your past you have mentored and you talked with and given advice to and then ultimately ended up earning the business or hurting the business?

What do you think would be the number one factor for businesses that fail?

Tony: You could say luck. Some businesses have failed because it was just bad luck. But they weren't listening. They weren't listening to what experts were telling them, be they trend forecasters, finance directors, or clients.

One of the things we used to talk about actually was having healthy paranoia. Now, I don't know if there's such a thing as healthy paranoia, but it meant that you did worry about things if it's too quiet. Why is that? And I think you have to take the pandemic out of it and all of that because nobody had a training manual for that.

But I think more often than not, you haven't read the rooms, you haven't smelled what's happening in the air. You've ignored the advice. You've not trusted how things are going or you just haven't changed quick enough communications.

You know, look, we have social media. It's changed the way we operate in every single way. Things like the pandemic came along and changed the way we operated entirely. There are so many scooters on the road now delivering food.

It's affecting the landscape. It's all these things that can make you make really poor decisions. There was the space race and the Americans spent something like $10 million developing a pen that could work in zero gravity. And the Russians gave their astronauts a pencil. You kind of go, there's a little bit of that.

How do you react to the way the market is going? You know, you can't just sit there and go, it won't affect me. We won't do Internet banking. People will never do it. Well, they will. We don't want mobile phones. Yeah, we do. People are going to want big screens on this.

No, they're not. Listen to the early adopters. See what's going on in the market. You cannot keep pretending it won't change because it will. You have to embrace change all the time. That would be my number one thing with anybody who doesn't want their business to fail: to embrace change.

But before you even think about doing it, always check. Does the world need another one? That's the difficulty of people who, you know, have their hearts set on things like restaurants or bars. This is a lovely business, but you can fall out of fashion very, very quickly.

Sometimes there's just nothing you can do about it. Apart from going, does the world need another restaurant? But they might need my restaurant. And that's what's lovely about entrepreneurs. The problem for entrepreneurs is that they start with a dream and a vision and they end up fixing it.

And that's what they have to stop trying to do. They've got to get out of doing it and go back to their dream and their vision. I think that when businesses can fall apart, the vision is no longer achievable either because you lost sight of it or just the market pivoted and you were not in that pivot.

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Tony Harris

Website: https://strayrhino.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-harris-8ab54a91

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-101-Tony-Harris-ebook/dp/B09WXR9Q2N