Change is a good thing. Why? It challenges you. It pushes you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes the fact that people don’t like getting out of their comfort zone is the very reason they don’t want to change that much. In the fast-moving pace of business, however, adapting to change is vital for long term success.
Change is good for your business because of the following reasons:
1) If you do not change – you become stagnant
2) Staying where you are prevents you from seeing and pursuing new opportunities
3) Avoiding change prevents you from implementing innovation or improvements
Stagnant
Who wants to be fuddy duddy? Same ol’ same old? No one really. Ensuing stagnation will make people lose interest in you . . . eventually. Think of it this way; the tiny old flip phone. No one uses it. Yesterday, Samsung just announced a new flip phone. It is pretty neat and nifty. Early adopters will go for it and fork over the nearly $2k price for it.
Here’s another example of stagnation –Why do you think Payless Shoe Store is closing after filing bankruptcy in 2017? They did not change much over the years. Same discounts. Same brands. Same look in stores. Same store experience. Same ol, same old. Nothing new. Nothing exciting. Ho hum. Even their website could not beat Zappos.com who is the leading online retailer for shoes by the way. Zappos.com offers free shipping on all products plus easy to navigate website with shoes from all angles to make buying shoes online a pleasant experience.
Missed Opportunities
A business does not exist in a vacuum and niche markets are as quickly flooded with competing companies as they are created. Your competitors are already trying to win as many customers as possible to increase their own market share. This means you need to be staying ahead by developing and launching new and innovative products or services as quickly as possible.
By not changing, you are missing out on growth opportunities either when it comes to your products or services or market opportunities.
Innovation
Accepting failure as part of a learning process is part of accepting change. Innovation comes from creativity. The freedom to be creative and experiment that leads to the discovery of new ideas or new processes that leads to enhanced profitability or customer experience.
New ideas sometimes can lead where one could disrupt the current status quo, sometimes filling a need that people weren’t aware of. Examples would be Uber and Airbnb. But that would not happen if you allowed yourself to be open to change. To be creative, to experiment and make mistakes, learn from it and move on to try another idea.
Change is and can be exciting. It depends on how you look at it. If you could look at it as something that can keep you interested, excited and learning, then positive things can happen.
President John F Kennedy said it best in a way, “Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” In other words, change is inevitable – we’ve heard that. It is going to happen regardless we want to or not. Growth however, is optional. To be successful as business owners – we want change so we can grow – professionally, financially and finally, personally.