Why some agencies struggle to succeed, while others glide to success.
It seems that we constantly ask ourselves as consultants why some agencies we visit seem to struggle for every achievement and find roadblocks at every turn, while others seem to flow through problems and issues to continuous success. No, the agency owners are not without problems and issues, but they never become monumental. They are simply encountered, addressed, and forgotten.
The difference between the 'strugglers' and the 'gliders' appears to be the same as we encountered in our own youth and with our children as they were growing up. Some children struggle to achieve every success in school, while others seem to glide through their academic life with some failures, but mostly successes. Our strugglers were frustrated and angry at our gliders but could never understand why they seemed to 'get it' so easily, while they found every course and class a problem.
The difference between the strugglers and the gliders comprises the x-factor that determines how easily success comes to either students or business people. We began listing the x-factors some years ago, and feel we have a good grasp on them and can now pass them on.
- Gliders are willing and open to experimentation. They are willing to risk capital on new avenues to success, but they do not do so during the desperation associated with imminent crisis. They try new things whenever their educated prognosis tells them that the chances of success are better than their chances of failure. They do not run into and out of new ventures when the mood strikes them or when a venture becomes costly. They cost-justify and measure results compared to expectations.
- Strugglers are more likely to follow paths that have not succeeded in the past than to take any risk of change for fear that the change will be worse than their current condition. When change occurs, it is forced upon them and they face it with trepidation and an expectation of failure (so they can return to the norm). If it succeeds they treat it with cautious optimism, chalking the success to luck rather than to their good judgment.
- Gliders identify winning formulas and follow them until they no longer prove viable.
- Strugglers are easily identified in this trait. They are the ones who admit that a program or marketing effort worked well, but they simply stopped doing it.
- Gliders identify and eliminate the losers in their business (or personal) life - employees, producers, marketing programs, and markets. Nothing is sacred, and loyalty is never unilateral. If they have proven themselves to be unsuccessful, they are replaced with potentially successful entities. This is not heartless. This is the reality trait of successful people.
- Strugglers tend to hold onto losers far too long. Under the guise of being nice guys they keep poor producers and employees. They keep unsuccessful marketing programs if they are keeping the agency busy, even though they are not productive. They feel that loyalty to a company is important even though the agency/company businesses no longer mesh and the people who returned the loyalty have changed or are long gone.
- Gliders have the inevitable positive mental attitude of winners. They know that they are and will continue to be successful. The path to success may have some roadblocks in it, but they are not cliffs from which they will fall and die.
- Strugglers view every crisis as the end of the world. They find themselves thinking about selling the agency when an important account leaves or when a company attitude changes.
Look to yourselves to determine if you have the x-factor of a glider or whether you are a struggler. Please understand that it is not agency size that differentiates the gliders from the strugglers. We have seen some large agents with the struggler traits. It is not the carriers or the market that defines the x-factor. We have seen both types of agents representing the same companies in the same market conditions.
The glider x-factor seems to reside in people who have good self-esteem but are not egomaniacs. It is more common in people who are confident and content in their lives, who are willing to follow positive guidance (i.e. setting goals and working toward them), and who value relationships over profit. Those relationships seem to mature into growth and profit. If you have the glider x-factor or want your x-factor to come out, begin acting like the gliders rather than the strugglers. Self-fulfilling prophecy really works if you apply these traits consistently.