This week: Contract Niggles and a Mental Wiggle

Welcome to this week’s ‘Clear Course’: let’s jump straight in.

This week’s Driver: Belief

You don’t have to look far to find the one thing you can implement this week to build your confidence in your business’s ability to land its plan. Because this week’s Driver in your own head.

If you want to bulletproof your long-term plan from legal stuff, you first have to believe that legal stuff can be predicted.

Now, I know ‘belief’ sounds a bit intangible. But intangible doesn’t mean unimportant. Because there’s one very good reason why you actually need believe that legal stuff can be predicted:

The legal industry would prefer you to think that legal stuff just surprises you from out of nowhere.

Law firms like it when you think legal stuff is unpredictable because that leaves you on the back foot when it does come up (as it inevitably will, as you grow). That then leaves you with no option but to react and fight hard. And once you start fighting over legal stuff, its very, very hard to stop, as things quickly get ‘emotional’. Before you know it, you’re spending more and more time (and money) on legal battles, and less and less on directly landing your long-term plan.

If the legal industry really wanted you to believe that legal stuff was predictable, they’d be specifically helping you to do that. And if they were helping you to do that, they wouldn’t be charging by the hour, given that predicting legal stuff takes way less time than endlessly fighting about it.

But they do charge by the hour, and they don’t want you to believe that legal stuff is predictable.  Which is why you’ll have to make yourself resist all the existing noise that says the right legal strategy is to sit back, hope, and then react & fight if something comes up. And why, to bulletproof your long-term plan from legal stuff, you have to first believe that legal stuff can be predicted.  

Once you believe you can predict legal stuff, you give yourself the platform to go ahead to do just that to protect your long-term plan (and we’ll cover how to do that across the next few editions of Clear Course). Without that belief though, you’ll be stuck reacting, fighting and making law firms rich(er).

 This week’s Sleeper: Don't sleep on that contract niggle

To help protect your plan, your one thing to wake up to this week before it wakes you up seems tiny. But like a pebble* in your shoe or the princess with the pea, small things can have big consequences.  

That small thing to not sleep on? Every contract niggle.

Not the big issues with customers, suppliers or partners: if your business is even halfway competent, those get flagged, spotted and dealt with pretty well. No, the ones to wake up to are those little complaints.

The ones that start with “well, I wasn’t going to raise this, but…”. Or “ah, this isn’t really that big a thing, but I just thought I’d mention…”. These are the issues that don’t have a big immediate financial or operational impact. They don’t demand immediate action. Something bigger or more urgent almost always comes along to take your attention away. So they are very easy to sleep on and ignore.  Don’t do that, though.

Make sure to collect, collate and consider all the small contractual niggles across your business. Each of those small niggles is a warning sign of potentially bigger things to come.  And it is always, always easier to fix things when they are small, so they don’t become big issues.  

So, to protect your plan, don’t sleep on contract niggles. Collect, collate and consider them. And then debate and resolve them with the other business.

Yes, you may end up reviewing and thinking about things that genuinely are a big old nothing-burger. But that’s a small price to pay compared to your long-term plan being taken out by a contract niggle that grows into a big issue. Plus in doing so, you’ll also start to build a reputation for being a first class business to deal with.  Which sounds like a win-win, to me.

This week’s added extra:

It’s easy to think that plans must have financial goals. And certainly, almost all of them do. But big plans can have other goals. 

When I joined offshore helicopter operator Bristow Group, it was just starting out on a big plan to implement a new safety programme called ‘Target Zero’.  That sounds simple enough. But it actually involved instilling a new mindset right across the organisation. And that took a lot of dedication, determination and consistency.  Such was the success of this plan, Target Zero is still in place at Bristow today. And it shows that big plans don’t have to financial goals: they just need to be transformational for your business.

Many thanks for reading: I really do appreciate you giving me your time. If you’ve any thoughts on this new format (good or bad), please do let me know.

Till next week, keep your eyes on the prize

 Andrew