Owning the Outcome and Making Changes for Success

I have a question for you: Do you ever notice that when we don’t achieve what we’re looking for, we often have a tendency to blame external factors or place blame on the outside world? We often don’t take the time to make the changes necessary for success.

Sausage Story Time

Flashback to the early days of M&M. As you may know, my dad is the founder of M&M Meat Shops which grew to 470 locations across the country. There are lots of great stories that came out within that and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years.

Back in the first year of business, my Dad – Mac, and his partner – Mark, were thinking about this one product that they could see sitting on the shelf called summer sausage. It was mind-boggling – “That summer sausage is so good and we can’t figure out why it doesn’t sell.”, they thought. At the time, because it was perishable, they were afraid to bring in too many. They didn’t want it to waste and they’d have to throw it out. Often they would only have one or two sitting on the shelf.  They were just trying to be smart business owners and minimize waste.

They realized that having one or two didn’t look very appealing and appetizing, sitting lonely on the shelf.  They started to clue into the rules/laws of merchandising. To see an abundance of summer sausage would be more motivating for people to buy.

So, like many other entrepreneurs, they took a risk. That next week they ordered in 90 selling units of the summer sausage and they filled the shelf up.  Back then, in the early 1980s, sampling wasn’t really a thing, but they thought, “Let’s just cut one up. We’ll offer it for people to taste and they’ll see how good it is.”

Now they had an abundance of summer sausages sitting on the shelf and they were giving people samples and even saying things like, “You know, we can’t keep these on the shelf!  We had to order so many of them in because they’re so good and they’re selling so fast.”  People were buying multiple quantities and coming back for more!

That next week they sold 88 summer sausages!

It’s not you, it’s me.

The moral of this story is that when Mac and Mark knew that in order to create positive change, they needed to reflect on what they needed to do differently.  Rather than blaming the lack of sales on external factors like, “oh people just don’t like summer sausage” or some retail-like excuse like, “oh the weather hasn’t been good so our sales are down”, they would stop and think,  “Wait a minute, what are we missing? What do we need to do differently here?”

So for you today, my exponential growth tip (which applies to business and life!) is to stop blaming the outside world for things that do not seem to be working, and start reflecting on what changes you can make to achieve exponential results.

Reflect internally on what changes you can make that will help you achieve exponential growth.

If this gets your wheels turning, I would love to hear from you.  Or if you need help assessing what changes you might need to make to achieve exponential growth, reach out!  My email address is angela@angelacote.com

I’d also love to hear stories of times where you’ve had to reflect inwardly as opposed to blaming the outside world and how it affected your growth.

In the meantime, as always, go be awesome!