What if the discomfort you’re feeling in your business right now is actually proof that you’re growing?
Growth is often sold as an exciting journey, but the reality for most trade business owners is that growth feels messy, stressful, and uncomfortable
In this episode, you’ll learn why discomfort is a natural part of business growth—and how embracing it can help you build a stronger, more successful business.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- The powerful lobster growth analogy and why discomfort is often a sign that you’re expanding beyond your current limits.
- The three most common growth challenges trade businesses face: increased workload, investment pressure, and acquiring new customers.
- How to define success, manage growth strategically, and know when it’s time to pause, regroup, and prepare for the next stage of expansion.
Listen now to learn how to navigate the uncomfortable stages of growth with confidence and turn short-term challenges into long-term business success.
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This podcast helps the entrepreneur, founder, CEO, and business owner in the trade, construction and industry segments, regain focus, build confidence, and achieve measurable results through powerful sales training, effective sales strategy, and expert sales coaching—guiding every sales leader, sales manager, and sales team in mastering the sales process, optimizing the sales pipeline, and driving business growth while fostering leadership, balance, and freedom amidst overwhelm, stress, and potential burnout, creating lasting peace of mind and smarter decision making for every California business and Australia business ready to scale up with excellence in sales management , through refined sales processes, proven trade sales techniques, and strategic sales leadership that strengthens sales process execution, accelerates sales team development, builds stronger sales teams, improves time management for sales, drives resilience and results, increases team results across the construction industry and wider industry sales sectors, and supports sustainable trading growth that continues to drive results through an effective management process in modern trade sales.
Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
Growth should be uncomfortable, but for any trade leader out there, leaning into being uncomfortable will without doubt help you grow your sales far more quicker than without it.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
Today, we’re going to focus around why being uncomfortable during growth periods is actually really good for you as a business leader. We’re going to do so by looking at an example I learned from a friend of mine a couple of months ago now, one I’d like to share with everyone.
And then as a third topic for today, we’re actually going to have a look at three of the most common types of being uncomfortable when it comes to growth that I see trade businesses experience. So, today’s episode comes off the back of actually a new friend and his name is Andrew Young. He’s head of sales for a global travel company.
Hi, Andrew. Shout out to you when you’re listening. But he talked me through an example that I really liked when we were on holiday in Thailand earlier in this year.
And it’s fantastic, right, for me when you get to meet people in the sales industry and can learn from them. I’m 25 years in sales and I’m still meeting people that I really regularly learn things from. And I think for anyone out there who’s selling, it’s a great way to live life, being open and curious to all the new things that you can learn.
So, Andrew, for me, we spoke a bit about growth and how it can absolutely get a little bit testy when you as a business are growing, particularly when you’re trying new things. And Andrew taught me through a great analogy around lobsters. So, I didn’t know this.
And please, I hope this is factually correct. It’s on you, Andrew, if not, but I have checked up on it. But lobsters actually, as an example, lobsters grow out of their shells.
So, across periods of their lives, they will grow and their current shell that they’re in will become too small for them. And when that shell becomes too small, it can be really uncomfortable. So, for the lobsters, they retreat to a safe place under a rock, for example, for their new shell to be grown.
And once they’re into that new shell, they go through the same process where they eventually grow out of it, shed that shell in a safe place, build a new one and so on, on repeat. And what I really liked about this analogy from Andrew, which he quite deliberately said to me, it’s a great way to think about growth, that as you grow, you do get a little bit uncomfortable, but to recognize that being uncomfortable is actually part of that growth, in a lobster’s case, part of you getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And what I really like about this example is two things.
Number one is that piece around quite simply that if growth was meant to be easy, then we’d see more people do it. If going into business was meant to be easy, we’d see more people do it. If growing your business was meant to be easy, then more and more people would do it without so much of a challenge.
But the piece I also like around it was that when you need a moment to reset yourself to grow again, moving to a place of safety is a really nice way to do it. And I’ll talk through that as we go through today. But where I want to focus on is the growth piece and why being uncomfortable can really help you grow.
There’s three areas in particular that I see trade businesses get uncomfortable around when it comes to growth. So, the first one here is they get really busy. So, trying lots of new things or even just one new thing, which generally they’re not going to be as efficient as, and please have a think about this yourself if you fit any of these examples.
But they’re generally not as efficient at something that is new versus something they’ve done over and over again, which means they make mistakes, which means it takes more time, right, which means it can impact other parts of their business. So, as you are growing, expect to be busy I think is the message that I pass across. And please don’t see that as being a problem if you are working a little bit harder than normal while you’re growing because once you get that growth down pat, you are then able to have a new process, a new system, a new customer database, a new segment, whatever it may be embedded into your business, right.
So, that period of working harder, of being busy allows you to learn, allows you to test what you’ve learned, fix any issues, and then go on to repeat. So, being uncomfortable when you’re growing because you’re busy is so normal for trade or any businesses. The second area where I see trade businesses get a little bit uncomfortable during growth periods is around investment because often either A, they’re less efficient at something, which we’ve spoken about being busy, which means they’re spending more money or more time to get things right, but B, they’re often investing in new types of marketing activities, in new processes for quoting, in programs to help them learn, right, coaching and training, right.
Lots of different ways that businesses, particularly trade businesses, are investing in to help them grow, which can be uncomfortable because it means profit in that moment can deteriorate unless you are able to obviously return sales very quickly. And yes, there are so many people out there that will talk about how you can have cash flow positive growth, but I’m talking about a real world where it’s often not possible to nail it every time, right. Sometimes it’s just expensive to grow.
So, where I see people get really uncomfortable around that expensive growth can often lead them to stop wanting to grow, whereas there are without doubt ways that we can manage investment, that we can manage where you’re spending extra money to grow around to see results and to measure those results before we get in too deep. It’s a common area as a trade business if you’re growing that you’re uncomfortable around investment, very, very normal. Third area that we see people get uncomfortable in a trade business is the acquisition of new customers because when you’re growing, it often means more work trying to grow new customers, more work going back to old customers to get new business or more work trying to increase the average sales size of existing customers.
And that can make trade businesses in particular uncomfortable because they need to start focusing on their sales activities, right. The way they’ve done things in the past won’t work to help them grow. It’s a very common outcome for businesses that want to grow which means they have to spend time in learning how they can gain new customers.
It’s not just marketing leads but it’s also how you execute in a sales process. So, really commonly where I see a period of trade businesses being uncomfortable is around new customers. So, three areas when we talk about this lobster example, right, growing, getting uncomfortable in that shell that they have and thanks Andrew for the example and thanks for the royalty-free rights to re-explain it.
But those three areas where we see trade businesses getting really uncomfortable is around busyness when you’re growing, investment, so spending money to grow and gaining new customers, having sales activities that are going to get them to that new level of growth. So, if you’re a business that’s wanting to grow and you’re experiencing some of those, I think the first message is that that’s normal. The second piece I’ll talk about then though is that when that growth can get too much, retreating into a comfortable space, right, a safe space to allow you to reconnect, regather your thoughts, recalibrate.
We’ve done exactly this with a couple of our businesses recently. In fact, one of our great painters is doing this activity right now. They are simply retreating.
They are holding steady on their growth numbers. They’ve grown significant amounts. They’re about four times the size over the last 15 months, right, but they have now retreated to steady their business.
They’re not going to grow for the next few months, right, get the processes down pat, recoup some of the money on investment and get their time back under control before they go again. So, I really love the part of that story which I think gets overlooked is that yes, growing is uncomfortable, but B, it’s also okay to retreat back from growth once you’ve had a period of significant business improvement or business growth to then get ready to lock and load again. But I think as we’re finishing up today and, you know, we think about as a business that’s growing, whether we’re having pressures or being uncomfortable around being busy, around our investment or around gaining new customers, the area I recommend is for each of those is for you to define what success looks like.
To sit down and say, okay, we’re about to grow. I’m going to get busy. I’m going to be working an extra 10 hours a week.
However, in eight weeks’ time, this is what I want to achieve. I’m going to be funding this growth and I’m going to be spending $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 to grow this part of the business, but here are the results I need to get to. And the third piece is I’m going to be acquiring new customers.
Here’s how I’m going to go about improving my sales process. Now, with each of those, what we’re doing is measuring what success looks like, which will allow us to calibrate against those as we are going through that growth period. So, as we leave today, thank you.
I’m grateful if you’re listening as always. I want you to have a think about if you are a business that’s growing and if you’re having any of those lobster-like challenges. But if you’re not a business that’s growing fast enough or, indeed, if you’re having those challenges, which can be really frustrating because it’s often extra effort without the growth, without the money in the bank in return, jump into our show notes and have a go at the free growth quiz.
It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s free and it will absolutely allow you to pinpoint an area of your business that you can use or you can leverage to grow your sales by 20% to 25%. That’s a very common result I see from doing this. It’s in the show notes.
Please jump in, click on it. But until we do catch up next time, very much focus today around being 1% better each and every day. The lobster example, thank you Andrew Young for that one today.
We will catch you back next time. Bye for now.