Small Fish Toolbox Tips – Emergency Edition, How to Deal with Unexpected Situations!

 

Do you ever feel like lots of things go wrong at the same time? Or that you are just too busy? How do you deal with the stress that can bring? Life is complicated and it can seem as if everything happens at once! It certainly seemed that way for our tame business coach, Jon Dale recently – read his blog and watch his video for how he and his business coped when things went awry for him…….

Jon’s Journey Episode 10: The Unexpected Journey To Spain Part 1

We’ve got a slightly different Toolbox Tip today – it’s about dealing with the unexpected and it’s come from my own recent personal experience. Very recent.

On Saturday, my Mum got in touch to say Dad has his date for his (long awaited) heart operation, “He goes into hospital tomorrow, get yourself to Spain right now.”

Now, this is not entirely unexpected – I’ve been waiting for them to give me a date for a while and expecting to come to Spain to give my Dad support and to look after Mum while she’s on her own. (They live in Spain – retired here 25 years ago – lucky things).

So I booked flights, flew back to Byron from my holiday in Hobart with Michelle, then flew straight out to Spain, via Dubai with a 2 hr stopover.

I arrived in Spain, went to bed, woke up 3 hours later and drove to Granada to the hospital to see my Dad go into theatre.

He’s had his 8-hour operation, seems OK, no complications and I’m pleased to be here to help.

“What’s the tip, Jon?” I hear you say.

The tip is that I’ve had (and my team is having) to be flexible in the way we think and operate to handle this new situation. We’ve called all my clients and rescheduled coaching sessions so I can meet people and we can work at times that can work for everyone (and still visit Dad during visiting hours).

We’ve run out of videos for the Toolbox Tip, so I’ve quickly prepared this written Toolbox Tip instead.

And, amazingly, the business is running – almost as smoothly as normal.

And this is the lesson – we need to be flexible. Unexpected shit happens all the time. We need to build businesses that can survive without us doing everything ourselves. We need a team that can handle stuff for us and for our customers.

You need this – you need to build a business that can work without you if you have to go and spend 2 weeks in Spain looking after your Dad. Or two weeks surfing in Bali, or whatever. And not just a business that you can have a holiday from but a business that actually works kind of on its own – not just when you are doing things to make it work.

That’s what I want for my business and for my customers – I want them to be able to get what they need whether I’m there to give it to them or not – that’s why I make the video content and that’s why all the training part of my coaching program is building up on video too. (It’s called the Tradies Toolbox and it’s pretty good).

How’s your business? Systemised and works without you or fully dependent on you?

If it’s more dependent on you, have a think about what you could do to change it – to build systems and to train people so you can be extracted.

For me, it’s video and an offshore team of smart people. For a trade business, it’s systems and processes, and onshore tradespeople, and onshore or offshore admin people.

I help people build those systems and processes into their trades businesses. Book a ten-minute chat with me to talk about whether coaching is the right thing for you right now.

Jon’s Journey Episode 10: The Unexpected Journey To Spain Part 2

As you know, Jon, our tame business coach, is in Spain at the moment.

But, before his trip, bad things happened to him. He got a cold, his dog died, had to bury him in the garden, drive to Brisbane, fly to Spain.

And Jon started to worry about the meetings scheduled with his clients. Negative thoughts started to sink in. It was stressful. There was a bit going on.

So how did he manage it?

Watch it in this video.

 

Did you miss Jon’s last post? Watch it here….