F*ck Your Pride

As Bob Dylan wrote, the walls of Pride are high and wide. Can't see over to the other side. It's time for us to have a very candid talk about your Pride and what it is doing to your business.

Welcome to the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Concise lessons learned the hard way about business, strategy, and life.

Most businesses need not fail. And yet tens of thousands fail every year. Many more struggle along for years before the pain is so great that they are finally put out of their misery. I am in the business of fixing businesses that are not working well and the single biggest impediment to turning a business around is that most business owners do not ask for help until it's too late. Why would a smart business owner, CEO or Board of Directors not ask for help when the likely alternative is their business ceases to exist?

Why would an entrepreneur choose to put their savings, home and family at financial risk when simply calling someone with the right expertise could change such an important outcome. Having worked with dozens of businesses in the past decade and made the tough call for help from my own business before that, there is one word that keeps coming up, pride. You don't want it to look like you don't know how to run your business. You lie to yourself that the problems are only temporary. You do not want to admit things are not going well.

Your hundreds of excuses that prolong the simple and immensely brave act of raising your hand and saying, I need help. Pride, pride and pride. Well, guess what? Fuck your pride. Please tell me a single thing that your pride will fix or make better.

Just one. Tell me how your pride will help you when there are a dozen critical decisions that need attention and you are the only person trying to figure it all out. Tell me how Pride gives you the experience of someone that has spent their careers fixing businesses and knows how to triage the situation for you. Tell me how Pride does anything but become what will torment you for many more years after the business is gone. And I speak from experience here, it will.

Pride is as much a business person's enemy as fear. I'd say more. Yes, it is so terrifying that no action seems like the best action. The business tornado you find yourself in feels hopeless so you might as well go down with the ship. You read an article that you can learn a lot from your failures, so you hang your head onto that thought.

You don't even talk to your closest friends for fear you will seem weak or less able than them. All just more bullshit to put on the shelf next to your pride. Where is this great pride when we realize our health is in jeopardy or someone close to us is sick and needs to find a specialist that could mean life or death? We run through fire and brick walls to find the best doctor for them. But when the life or death of our business is at stake, we do little or make matters worse by flailing at the problems or spending more on marketing or sales without diagnosing the problem with honesty and urgency.

Somewhere, pride has become an important piece of armor in business. I want to know why. My clients, the ones that ask for help, are some of the smartest and bravest business people I have ever met. They replaced the shield of pride with one of courage. Their businesses are all thriving because they chose their business over their pride.

So rather than decide it is a truism that business owners, boards, investors and CEOs do not ask for help when their businesses are in trouble. I want to fight back against your foolish pride that is willing to let you and your business fail before you will ask for help. Your pride is killing your business and doing the same to your life and your most precious relationships. Fuck your pride. Who am I to be telling you this?

Allow me to tell you the pain my pride cost me. In the middle of nineteen ninety six, I sat down in the big chair after being promoted to the president of a middle sized freight logistics company. More than 140 in staff, six offices in The United States, and $150,000,000 in revenue flowing in and out of the organization. While that may sound exciting, the real picture was not a rosy one. The business was losing money, a lot of money.

Clients had gone bankrupt on us as they fought through the recession in the middle of the nineties, leaving us holding the bag. Our competitors, flailing in response to the same recession, were giving away services for less than half of our normal fees and clients demanded we match their competitive quotes. Our bank was breathing down our back. I remember it so vividly. Looking out across my desk was like looking at a landscape littered with business wreckage.

So many things urgently needed my attention that it was hard to know where to begin. But more than anything, I felt alone in the battle. Like any competitive industry, if the staff thinks the ship may be sinking, they start looking for another ship to jump to. My core team was more than loyal, but human nature is what it is and they had families to feed. So, I felt it was up to me to deliver on the challenge alone.

My friends, old and new, looked to me as a young but smart business person. I'm sure you'll figure it out, they would say. So how could I tell them about my deep fear and worry? What would they think of me if they knew the truth? So many things needed to get done, so many things.

After deciding I was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, I picked up the phone and called a business owner I respected and asked for a referral to someone who could provide candid coaching support and counsel. Specifically, I said, I do not want a management consultant that will tell me to buy low and sell high or write some giant report. I want someone who will tell it to me straight and call me out when I am bullshitting myself. My first call with his recommendation lasted well over an hour. When we were done, I asked the two questions that were left to ask.

Can I afford you and can I afford not to afford you? I made one of the hardest and smartest business decisions in my professional life and spent the money we didn't really have. Because getting the company back into the black would be worth a 100 times what I would pay him. My business and those that depended on it were worth that risk. He supported me as advertised.

I now had someone who had been through deep business struggles many times before. I could tell him the naked truth and he wasn't going anywhere. He called me out on my bullshit with candor, empathy and integrity. Within six months, we were back on track. We adjusted our focus and made some smart moves into higher margin businesses.

We executed a plan that had a manageable number of objectives. Within twelve months, we were back to profitability. But here is what is more important, I should have called him two years earlier. Why didn't I? I knew the business was stumbling and tried everything I could think of to fix it, but I never asked for help.

Sure, I talked to marketing design, PR and communication agencies looking for some secret sauce and paid handsomely for them to build up the facade of a business that deep down I knew was cracking at the foundation. What I could not see was what so many others also never see until it's too late. It was the business end of the business that needed attention and very few like to get involved on that side. It's not sexy, the underlying issues are not clear and the outcome is far from certain. There is no magic bullet other than grinding work, tough choices and demons to face.

But leave it alone in this battle and you will continue to feel alone. The end of the story ends badly and it will end. Over twenty five years have passed since I picked up the phone and asked for help. Since the business turned around, we were able to sell it in early two thousand. A few years later, I hung out my own shingle to help business owners never have to go through what I went through.

To help those that are brave enough to ask for help before it's too late. To realize what I have after all of these years, most businesses need not fail. Having now helped dozens of business owners, entrepreneurs and leaders of non profits through their own dark times, there is one common threat they defeated before I could help them. It is the same demon that caused me to lose two years and my smile before asking for help, pride. As Thomas Merton said, pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

In the toughest of times, my pride betrayed me by masking my real fears and kept me alone with my pain and my stress. Well, guess what? Fuck my pride and fuck yours too. I challenge you to start thinking about how your pride is hurting your business and stopping you from dealing with the struggles that will unlock the business and the life you truly want. Have the hard conversations, even if it's just with yourself at first.

Find that confidant that will call you out on your bullshit. Watch what happens when you just let go and say no more to the stress and worries you carry along alone. Your pride is stopping you from building a business that makes you proud. Now you know what to do with that pride. Go do it.

Thanks for listening.

This has been the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Be sure to subscribe wherever you like listening to your podcast or hop on over to businessbrickyard.com.