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Evolutionary Business Design

How to move on when things change

I was recently having lunch with a lovely client I had coached several years ago. We’d had enormous fun working on their family business together. It grew and flourished over a number of years and gave them everything they wanted; a great income, opportunities, education for their children and travel – a very good life.

But it has been disrupted over the last few years by legislation and compliance. It has ceased to be as much fun as it was.

This is no longer the business they started with. They’d lost their passion for it. They had a decision to make: they could stay and try to ride it out or move on and sell it to someone else to create the next chapter. They decided to part with it.

So that’s what we were talking about – how to move on when things change.

First we tackled all the perceived negatives: “Who would want us at our age” (not yet 50!) “We have no qualifications”. “It’s too late to start university”. “Do we want another business?” “Should I get a job?”

Then we got to the positives: The irreplaceable experience they had running this particular business for 15 years. The roles they had taken on: business management, financial management, HR and people management, stock control, marketing, sales, business structure, time management… the list is very much longer.

We talked about “reinventing” yourself. Understanding the skills and natural talents you have and how valuable that is in business – and in life.

And we talked about self-worth and self-belief and that until you can get a better sense of yourself and the value you bring, you’ll pitch yourself too low. The temptation would be to take something to be safe rather than work out what you really want and shoot for the stars.

It was a fascinating lively conversation. This wonderful amazing talented person who came in with her shoulders drooped left on a high, with a much better sense of starting out on a new “grand adventure”.

You don’t know what the future holds. No-one does and yet we go through life wanting to control everything.

Yet some of the grandest adventures in life are beyond what you can imagine. You just need to let go a little and trust that the Universe is conspiring to do you good.

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