ChangeMasters

How To Actually Make the Changes You Already Know You Need To Make

Barry J. Moltz

• Publisher: Vicara Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781950665693
• eBook ISBN: 9781646870950
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Why do so many small business owners pay for expensive advice, agree to take action... and then never follow through? Change Masters exposes the true reasons for this inaction and reveals how any business owner can do better.

Over the past 20 years of working with thousands of small business owners, expert Barry Moltzhas just about seen it all. Typically, his client's company is stuck with a problem such as stagnant business growth or shrinking revenue. The story is always the same. Moltzis hired, the situation is analyzed, a strategy is agreed upon. And then almost nothing happens.

This book is inspired by this all-too common scenario. Most small business owners can implement a few easy steps, but what does it take to make the critical or difficult ones that could make a difference? This book was written to answer that question.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TROUBLE WITH CHANGE

I HAD A CUSTOMER, Jim (not his real name), who paid me $50,000 for a year to help him implement the changes he wanted to make to grow his company profitably. We conducted weekly meetings and many phone calls with his team, where we discussed the specific issues he faced and how to move the business forward. I loved working with him since he was a sharp guy who knew his industry and what his customers wanted. One day, while waiting for him in his office, I reflected on what we had accomplished working together. My conclusion—absolutely nothing! I suddenly realized he did not follow a single word of advice I’d given him and only took a few of the action steps we mutually agreed upon.

Every time we’d meet, Jim enthusiastically agreed that things needed to change. However, when it was time to act and follow the new, agreed-upon path, he hesitated. He stalled. He made excuses. He ultimately blamed me. This confused me because he strongly supported the need for change, yet he could barely get past the first step. I wondered why he’d initially hired me to help enact changes.

None of this made sense. Jim was an intelligent and logical entrepreneur who ran a somewhat successful company. He earned enough to support his family and their lifestyle and was smart enough to know his company was stuck and it needed to improve to get to the next level. Jim even realized he needed outside support from someone like me to make change happen. Plus, he was aware of his strengths and weaknesses as a leader and manager of his business.

And still—nothing actually changed. I later learned I wasn’t alone in my experience. Jim frequently sought highly paid advice from sources like me but rarely followed any of it.

Why this sounds so familiar

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years working with small business owners, I’ve met too many Jims. It puzzled me why people would pay for expensive advice but use so little of it.

As I said in the Introduction, these experiences drove me to search for the answers. And I’ve uncovered several reasons why the struggle with change is so common:

1 People try to “buy” change.

I sell inexpensive online video courses to small business owners who don’t have the resources to hire me personally or want to learn more after they’ve attended one of my events. Unfortunately, after selling many of these courses, I realized that 90% of the people who bought the system never started the first module!

I’m not saying they never completed the course. We all start things we never finish. I mean, they never even signed in to start one class even after paying for it. And they didn’t ask for their money back. When I first noticed this, it shocked me. Why would anyone pay for a class and not start it? And if they never used it, why wouldn’t they ask for their money back—especially when I offer a lifetime “no questions asked” money-back guarantee?

After talking to many of these non-users, I realized they thought buying the course was the equivalent of taking the key action to make the change. As a result, in their mind, no further action was required on their part. In other words, by purchasing the course, they thought they’d started to make the change. And if they still can’t change, they can say that the course “did not work” for them!

In other cases, after they purchased the class, their desire to change faded, and they did not want to admit their lack of effort to themselves and were embarrassed to ask for a refund since they never started the course.

As silly as this seems, it happens more often than you’d think—especially with small business owners. Even in my consulting practice, customers think just by paying to work with me, they are making a change. These business owners seem to be satisfied paying to work toward change instead of taking the difficult steps actually to change. Unfortunately, this is a very expensive way never to change.

Working with me is their “proof ” they tried to change, but it did not work. Their excuse: “I wanted to change. I hired a small business expert to help me, but even he couldn’t get the company to change.”

While this is not reality, it helps them stay in their comfort zone. They convince themselves that “it is better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all.” They then retreat to the comfort of doing the same old same old—even though it’s not really working for them.

2 People don’t want to do “more work” even if it results in positive change.

Intellectually, these small business owners know their companies need to change, but they are stuck. Doing the same things, the same ways, has produced enough success enabling them to keep going without making the drastic changes they’d need to get more than the same mediocre results. They may be stuck in a rut, but they’re actually comfortable there. And it doesn’t take any extra effort to remain—it’s become easy and routine for them. Plus, they’re not experiencing severe financial distress, so nothing forces them to put in the additional work to get on a different path.

Change is hard by itself, and altering long-practiced habits is even more challenging. But, given a choice, people will stick to the path they’re currently on; it’s just easier that way. Remember Newton’s First Law of Motion: “An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” I come into their companies as that unbalancing force, but ultimately when I leave, business owners stay where they were, headed in the same direction they were going before.

3 They are not in enough pain.

People only change when they are in so much physical, emotional, or financial pain that changing outweighs the fear of the unknown that change may bring. I have long believed people only buy a new product or service when they are in pain. Remember, consumers will always pay more for painkillers than vitamins.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 forced many of us to pivot in a direction we never thought we’d take, but we had no choice when life as we knew it collapsed. In March of 2020, as the fear of the virus ramped up, supermarket shelves were empty, and we would eat whatever we could buy. For me, fear of eating unknown or unappetizing foods was better than going hungry.

These owners do not heed my advice because things in their companies are faring well enough that they can afford to keep doing it the way they have always done it. Not making a change will not drastically reduce their income or put them out of business. They are comfortable enough where they are without doing anything different.

4 They fear any change, especially the unknown.

Regardless of the future, these owners are comfortable continuing along the same path. They fear change will make business more difficult for them going forward. Although their companies are far from perfect, the status quo is always an easier path to travel. Remember the idiom; “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”? In other words, even if you’re stuck, you’re better off sticking with the familiar than changing and plunging into the unknown—into what may be a disaster. Current comfort is always king.

As I’ve grown older, I have experienced this in my own life. The list of things I simply will not do grows bigger. I tell myself my body no longer allows me to do that. A great example is my karate practice over the last 20 years. As I’ve advanced through the black belt ranks, the curriculum got more difficult. This included doing more sweeps, falls, sparring and rolls. While I was never good at this to begin with, as I aged, I stopped doing these parts or pretended to do them. I reasoned it was no longer “safe” for me. Finally, my teacher, Jun Shihan Nancy, told me practicing karate this way was unacceptable. She understood that while these moves might be physically challenging, doing something was better than doing nothing. She told me that you must practice an accommodation that at least mimics the move that is safe for you. Doing something breaks the habit of doing nothing and forces change.

In fact, many small business owners who start as innovators stop taking risks because they fear change. For example, I sold my last large company in 1999 during the internet bubble. This was after I failed in my first two ventures, where I went out of business in one and was kicked out of the other by my partners.

After the sale, I didn’t start another full-blown operational business because, having gone through so many ups and downs in the 1990s, I was afraid to take another big risk. Selling allowed me to pay the bank the $1.3M I owed them, build a healthy nest egg to pay for my children’s college tuition, plus much more. So, I just was not willing to take another large-scale risk. While I have been fortunate to have done well financially over the past 20 years, I could not hit another sm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why This Book
• 1. The Trouble with Change
• 2. The Personal Face of Change
• 3. Researching Change: It’s Not You, It’s the Biology in Your Brain
• 4. One Solution is to Use Science to Train Your Brain for Change
• 5. How to be a ChangeMaster
• 6. How to Become a ChangeMaster for Others
• 7. How to Create Change in Sales and Marketing
• 8. How to Create Change in Managing Your Money
• 9. How to Create Change in your Customers’ Experience
• 10. How to Create Change in your Personal and Company Productivity
• 11. Change is, Well, Personal, Too
• Afterword
• Appendix 1-The Change Worksheet
• Appendix 2-How to Become a Certified ChangeMaster
• Resources