This past weekend I treated myself to the picture show and checked out the new movie Moneyball. If you haven't heard of or seen the movie, below is the synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes: Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball's conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs.....more
and the trailer:
A specific scene of the movie peaked my interest and made me think about what goes on in my company and the local HVAC industry as a whole. In the scene, Billy Beane is having a meeting with his teams head scouts and they are going over new players to possibly add to the roster. As each scout gives his typical and cliched notes on each player, Beane looks around and realizes that everything is the same, nothing has changed and in order to progress and move forward, things need to go a different way so the team can replace talent, have a successful season and achieve their goals on a very limited budget.
Sometimes in any industry or life, change is the hardest thing an individual or group can do, especially when money is tight. It's scary to venture outside your comfort zone and go against the grain of your normal life or business pattern to achieve something great.
This struck a chord because I have realized that in order for my company to succeed there have to be changes made. The company has run the same way for 20 years and we sometimes seem to be standing still. Not only that, since the economic downturn, it feels like we've gone backwards and are struggling to just get our legs back underneath us.
My main point is that in order for us to move forward and grow the company, we must embrace new technology and new ways of performing our day to day business. Whether it be social networking or easier ways of accepting payment, things need to evolve and move forward in order to avoid stagnation. This will, in turn, breed the success I would like to see for the company in the future.
Making changes can be hard and the old guard will always fight back and disagree with major changes. This is usually why no one takes chances and risk what has already been gained, because they may feel there is too much to lose. However, when things are just status quot and you feel like your standing still or in slow motion, something needs to happen. I am quickly learning that means things need to change. At least, that's how I see it for my company and what may be ahead of us.
The big question, for us, will be what is our best strategy being that we are such a tiny micro business. Resources are limited and so is time because of the responsibility load on both my father and I. There will obviously be many other questions that will have to be answered and that is part of running any business with any budget. I am convinced, like Billy Beane was that season, that there needs to be more out of the box questions asked and answered for this company to succeed in the future.
Go to Amazon and get your copy of the fantastic book Moneyball by Michael Lewis HERE and for your Kindle HERE