Winston Churchill’s famous speech rings in my ears every day.
“Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up!”
But that is exactly what I see over and over again. People giving up or “changing their goals” when roadblocks occur.
Look, I get having to pivot. Life is going to throw you curve balls. I know every self storage deal you work on is going to have surprises, challenges, and roadblocks on the way to success.
But what is needed is to change efforts, strategies, direction, but not the goals.
Thank you for allowing me to rant, but I get upset when I see roadblocks knock people out of the game over and over again. I’ve seen it many times in the past few months with people trying to start and grow their self storage business.
I get it. Getting in this business today is hard and challenging. But if you take quitting off the board, you’ll have to figure out how to solve your issues.
Here is what I see again and again.
- Goals are set.
- Very excited when the game starts.
- Starts to get real…somewhat scary….real money at stake.
- Challenge #1.
- “Well, I am not sure if this is for me anyway.”
- Challenge #2.
- Game over.
I see it over and over. Not just in self storage, but in many areas of life and business. But I do see it frequently in self storage because it’s a challenging market out there.
I’m not picking anyone out in particular, but if this is you, or you’ve done this in the past, I want to give you another option today.
What needs to change are two things:
- Your mindset.
- Your efforts.
The mindset is: if one person can do it, I can do it.
Really, if one person can buy in today’s crazy market, anyone can. It’s just harder, more hurdles to go over, more hoops to jump through.
But if who you are is “It shouldn’t be this hard, “or “I shouldn’t have to deal with these types of issues,” then when something comes up, it appears or occurs to you as wrong and bad.
“This shouldn’t be happening”
“It shouldn’t be like this.”
Why not?
Perhaps it is exactly as challenging as it needs to be. Perhaps it’s perfect.
Perhaps the market gets more challenging as more people get into the business. Any business. Perhaps this is nature’s way of weeding out the weak so only the strong survive.
Be part of the strong crowd.
Look, nothing I just said it TRUE. It’s just a more empowering context to play the self storage game in for me than ”Problems shouldn’t happen”.
Change the background noise you hear as you play the self storage game, and create ways to empower yourself as you deal with all the stuff you’ve got to deal with in business today.
Then, after you begin to alter you thinking about how the world is occurring to you, it’s time to really up your game. Up your efforts.
Let’s look at efforts.
When I actually had a job many years ago (I lost all visible means of support in 1986 when I went full time into real estate), I was a sales person for a couple of paint companies.
I was terrible. I would never hire me today as I look at who I was then.
But I learned back then from other terrible sales people. When it became clear we weren’t going to hit our quarterly goals or yearly goals….we’d start saying we should lower the goals to get closer to what was “really going to happen”.
My boss actually did that.
It never crossed my mind back then to alter the effort expended, not the goals.
But every challenge can be overcome with more effort and a change in how things are approached. Sometimes you even have to dump a project and move on to the next one.
But if you keep your eye on the prize, the real reason you’re attracted to this business, what this business can offer, you’ll be motivated to stay in the game.
THEN DOUBLE, TRIPLE, 10X YOUR EFFORTS.
Everything worthwhile in life always takes more effort than you initially expected.
I promise you that.
Think about your marriage (if you’re in one). Way more effort than you thought. Right?
If you graduated from college, it took so much more from you than you thought when you started. Right?
Anything worthwhile always takes more effort than you initially thought it would.
So expect it. Know it’s coming.
If you want to succeed in anything, it takes MASSIVE EFFORT today.
So for all of us, myself included, it’s time to change our thinking and up our game, increase our efforts. Even closing a self storage facility takes way more effort than ever before. We’re approved and scheduled to close on a project right now and I’m spending hours every day getting more and more documents to the lender so they can close an approved loan. So I’ll increase the amount of energy and resources expended to win the game.
And when you do win, when you close the deal, get the facility, are in the business, it is fulfilling…exciting…and new problems will have to be solved.
But they are problems in YOUR business. Those are problems worth having.
So ““Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up!”
