Beware ‘The New Normal’

As you may have noticed, the world is changing. The monarchy is apparently crumbling, political correctness is spreading faster than a Brazillian variant (I read a comment recently that ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners is offensive because of what he wanted her to do with that pretty red dress). I would catch some episodes of ‘On The Buses’ on satellite TV while you still can.

On top of all that, we have the consequences of a pandemic year. No more offices. No more live meetings. No more business travel. It’s the ‘new normal’ apparently.

But is it?

As I sit here with my Dexys album blaring loud, I have a warning for you: be very wary of ‘the new normal.’

Life as a business owner is a daily battle against the forces trying to mess up all of your hard work.

They’re rarely the forces of cunning enemies. They’re nearly always the forces of incompetence and laziness.

The new normal being foisted on us by the media and others is as close as you can get to a 24/7 party for the incompetent and lazy. So be careful!

So, a quick look at 3 elements of the new normal that directly affect you as an Entrepreneur.

But first, 2 quick points:

First, I can’t predict the future but I do think it’s highly likely that the whole ‘new normal’ thing will turn out to be 80% B.S. Human beings are very habitual animals drawn to habitual behaviour. After 9/11 everyone in the USA was terrified to fly. Travel was never going to be the same again. A few months later, all was back to normal.

Second, even when some of this does happen, just because ‘everyone’ is doing it, doesn’t mean that you have to do it. It’s your business. You decide. You’re not under the pressures that the big companies are under to keep the millennial masses happy and look good on the media. They can afford some of the very costly mistakes they’re about to make. You probably can’t.

So, our quick review of ‘The New Normal’:

Offices

Next time you’re bored, put one of the business TV channels on and watch them interview the CEO of a large corporation and ask about the future of their employees working from home.

As the CEO gives the politically correct answer about 3 day weeks etc, you will see the terror in their eyes.

What they know but dare not say is that at the best of times, most employees of large corporations are incompetent or close to it (think of the last corporation you dealt with.) And that’s when they’re trapped in an office with someone leaning over them and watching their every move.

The thought of everyone being allowed to let rip from home is terrifying. But that CEO is under pressure to keep with the new normal so they’ll compromise at a 3-day office week. The employees are happy with that because they like the social side of their work and 3 days should be just enough to catch up on the Kardashian gossip.

Of course, the whole thing is daft. If working from home can be made to work (which it can, with enforcement), go the whole way and set up an amazing virtual business. A few will do this, but not many.

So yes, working patterns will change, to an extent. But you need to be VERY careful with this. A small business that has one or 2 or a few key people can’t afford to mess with productivity. So if you want staff in your office 5 days per week because that works for you, don’t feel guilty about insisting on it. Your business is not a democracy. It should be a benign dictatorship. Plus there are many advantages for working for an Entrepreneurial business, as your team will be well aware. It may just be that working from home isn’t one of them.

If it sounds like I’m against virtual businesses, I’m not. I decided 5 years ago to build a completely virtual global business for many reasons, the main one being that I want to hire the best people in the world for my clients, regardless of where they’re located. It works brilliantly and as you can imagine, I’ve been very grateful over the last year that I made that decision. But we’re very clear with our team on boundaries, the main one being enforcement. We track and monitor everyone’s working time. Not because I don’t trust them. I do. My team is amazing. But if you’re going to be virtual, you have no choice.

Travel

I think that business travel will eventually revert to normal or close to it. It’s a big perk of the job for many in boring corporations. If you’re in a business that is linked to, or dependent in some way on business travel, hang in there and again, be skeptical of predictions of its demise

Meetings

This is another potential minefield for us as business owners. In my business, historically, most of our sales took place at seminars and live events or in one-to-one meetings with business owners. In 2020, not only did we replace all of that with virtual events, phone calls and online meetings, we had our highest year of sales ever.

But here’s the critical part: the fact that we’ve had that success does not equate to those methods replacing what used to work.

First, the business world has no idea yet to what extent Zoom meetings etc worked because we and our customers were forced into them and had no choice. I think a lot of people are fed up with Zoom and if you continue to depend on it because it’s cheaper/easier than face-to-face meetings, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

Second, they probably worked because we all got a lot better at making them work. That’s great but it doesn’t mean that live face-to-face meetings won’t have a higher close rate. Of course we’ll carry on using these new methods, but I’ll be doing it alongside live events and face-to-face interactions with customers.

For the last 100 years, in every test undertaken, the best place to sell with the highest conversions has been in front of another human being. Ignore that at your peril.

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