Let me ask you a question.

What kind of a major body of water tends to remain clean over a long period of time? I want you to think about it before answering.

The one that remains clean is the one that keeps moving AND EXPANDING. If the water body becomes stagnant for a long time, like in a pond, slowly it begins to collect waste material and begins stinking. The same is true for a person or a business that stops growing and expanding! Only those who continue grow and build themselves block by block tend to succeed continuously.

Most people and businesses seek stability. But guess what, stability is mostly an illusion. Every single day, things either get better or they get worse but they never stay completely the same.

Every day, our business is either getting better or it is getting worse, but it never remains the same. Whether it gets better or not depends solely on one question. Are we building our business block by block daily or are we only focusing on managing operations?

Many businesses and their management teams fall into the trap of only managing the contracts that they have already secured instead of giving active importance sowing the seeds to creating more relationships that would help grow the business further.

If you ask them, why they are not actively pursuing the business development process to build things block by block, they say they aren’t doing it because “their plate is already full.” But here is the thing, just because your plate is full today does not mean your plate will be full tomorrow or day after.

As the Coronavirus economic crisis has taught many industries, anything can go wrong at any moment and put you out of business. The only thing that will save you at that time are the resources you have already accumulated and the ability to adapt and stay relevant. Unless you have done both, you cannot afford to rest!

Let me share with you an example. Way before Netflix, there was an extremely popular DVD Rental Chain in The USA called Blockbuster. In fact it was so successful that the founder of Netflix approached Blockbuster to sell Netflix to them. But the executives at Blockbuster said “No Thanks! Our plate is full! Movie streaming services anyway have no future potential as people will always prefer the experience of going to a physical store and watching movies on rented discs!”

Turns out, they were WRONG. Within a few years, DVD rentals and usage reduced dramatically all over the world and people started consuming most video content Online. Netflix became a multi-billion dollar company and Blockbuster went Bankrupt! If only the executives at Blockbuster stayed humble and realized that they needed to continuously grow and adapt to stay relevant, they would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars instead of going bankrupt!

ALSO, let me share with you another advantage of continuously seeking growth. The more you focus your efforts on building the business block by block, instead of ONLY focusing on daily operations, the easier it becomes to achieve your life goals.

Suppose you are in the stone age/ancient times and are dragging heavy stones to get a job done. Now you may think you are busy and be working very hard but dragging stones takes A LOT of effort and generates little results. Now instead of dragging stones yourself, if you had the idea of building a cart and then attaching wheels to it and then moved the stones around on that cart, how easy would your job become? A LOT easier!

Dragging stones mindlessly is like daily operations. But having the thought process of building a cart with wheels and then moving stones on THAT is an example of Building a Business block by block!

Building the cart was a system that made your job easy. Similarly, in business, building your SALES PIPELINE BLOCK BY BLOCK and filling it with qualified leads every week is what will make your goals easy in the long run!

Finally, if there is one take-away I would like you to have after reading this article is to always pursue growth even if you think you are too busy managing daily operations. Don’t think that by not seeking growth you are lowering risk, because the greatest risk is to take no risk and become irrelevant. The greatest form of defence is to attack!

Always choose growth over stability as the only place where being stable is a good thing is if you are in the ICU of a Hospital! But even then, would you rather prefer being stable or would you rather get better and be discharged?!

You already know the answer!