The High Value Of Faster Answers

The late and truly great Rodney Dangerfield had this amazing short joke. I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn't met you yet. Psychiatrists know the answers that their patients need to hear, they just don't tell it to them.

We business people do the same thing with our clients. I think both are wrong, a big waste of time, and actually hurt our ability to be truly different in our chosen markets. Let's talk about it. I'm Howard Mann and this is the Business Brickyard Podcast. In the movie Molly's Game, the principal character, Molly, played by Jessica Chastain, was a hopeful Olympic skier before she tripped on a stick during her Olympic trials.

Her life evolves or devolves depending on your point of view as she becomes the creator of a high stakes poker game for the rich and famous in LA and then later in New York. While running her game in New York, the now IT poker game attracts some unsavory characters. Law enforcement jumps in and they pressure Molly to give up secrets on her players or face a very long jail sentence. Molly's estranged father shows up right before her trial and proceeds to have a short, direct, and life altering conversation with her. Her father, played by Kevin Costner, is a well respected psychiatrist.

He tells her, since she is in this moment of pure peril, that he is going to do what therapy patients have wished their therapists would do for decades just give her the answers. In fact, he promises her three years of therapy in three minutes. It is, after all, a movie. But hear it in his words. Alright.

We're gonna do three years of therapy in three minutes. How? I'm gonna do what patients have been begging therapists to do for a hundred years. I'm just gonna give you the answers. Armed with all he knows about her past, he proceeds to explain what compelled her to run card games, why she incorrectly thinks her father liked her the least, and why her failure at skiing was not the failure she made it to be.

The truth was that it was just simply a fluke as she tripped on a stick and it had no other meaning. His direct answers create a breakthrough and her father closes the scene by saying, See how much you can accomplish when you do not charge by the hour? People want answers. So what does this have to do with your business? Think for a moment about your sales process and how you deliver your service.

If the length of time you are taking to deliver your value is slowed because you will make more money by having a drawn out process, then you are cheating your client and yourself. The industries that follow a model that creates more revenue by going slower are many. The clients that want you to go slower and charge them more are few or none. Let me use my own process as an example. When I start working with a client, there is a certain amount I need to know about a business, its owner, their competitors, and their industry before I can give them a practical strategy that will fix whatever it is that's holding them back.

However long that takes is how long it should take, but not one hour or one day more. Dragging it out for any longer or waiting for my client to figure it out on their own, like a therapist who keeps asking, But what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? Diminishes the experience for everyone.

While getting to the answers matter, how quickly you can get there is just as important. A striptease is great in certain circumstances, and I will leave you to figure out when those are, but not when it comes to delivering answers or results that will change people's lives, businesses, or both. You know the famous quote by Henry Ford about how if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have just told him a faster horse? The quote is used to show how customers have no idea what they want, but it misses the bigger point. Customers did know what they wanted.

They wanted to get where they wanted to go faster. Henry Ford's solution was an automobile. People want answers as quickly as possible. What if you could create more value in getting people answers and or results faster than everyone else? This is what will allow you to stop presenting the same process that your competitors currently do.

What if you could do the discovery, strategy, design, and launch of a website in four to six weeks instead of four to six months? What if you were the lawyer that had a way to conclude a divorce in six weeks instead of the usual one to two years? What if you designed a process that allowed a business deal to close in weeks instead of months? What if your business coaching process took three months instead of a year or two? What if you were the therapist that after learning enough information, just gave your patients the answers to their problems?

You might think that you then need to charge less, although I would strongly argue that you should charge more. But you will also create the capacity to handle many more clients, projects, and transactions with the same number of people. You would also have a different story to tell that would attract clients that are sick and tired of endless projects and engagements that cost them too much money and time. Word-of-mouth would be off the charts. If you have high expertise in what you do and are always looking to increase the mastery of your craft, you already know most of the answers or how to get to them quickly.

You know the information you need to deliver great work for your clients. And I'm willing to bet with some effort you could figure out ways to get those same results much faster than you do today. Nobody wants to spend years in therapy, they just think that's the only way it works. Even though, as Molly's father admits, patients have been wanting faster answers for one hundred years. So, it stays the same until someone decides to change expectations.

As I love to say, why not you? For the people you sell to, what are their expectations in time and money for getting the results they truly want? How could you give them those answers in half the time and turn that into your competitive advantage? Speed to get to the right answer is a winning strategy that is worth far more than a slower process. It is seldom used.

You get to choose how you want to go forward from here. Do you want to take it the way it has always been done? Or do you want to find a way that gives your clients what they want but don't think is possible? It's your choice, your move. Until next time.

Hey there. Just a few quick notes before you get back to work. My goal is to make this podcast as useful as it can be for entrepreneurs who are not fulfilled by the businesses that they own. Your feedback, questions, and comments are not just welcome, they're encouraged. So please feel free to email me at h@howardMann.com.

Also, be sure to jump over to howard Mann dot com and join my mailing list. When you do, you will get a PDF of my book, Your Business Brickyard, for free and will be first in line when I launch new coaching groups and special events. You can also follow me, Howard Mann, on all of the various social channels. If you enjoyed this or any other episode of the Business Brickyard Podcast, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Every review helps to make the podcast better, reach more business owners, and it only takes a minute.

Most of all, thank you for listening. I truly appreciate it.