Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Returned With New Perspectives
My car's transmission is fixed and my wife and I are safely home. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I focused my time while waiting two days for repairs on looking for new perspectives. Here's what I found.

In the midst of an expensive and time-consuming delay, I specifically sought to see the good things that came from it both financially and personally. There were a bunch.

• The ONLY transmission shop in the area was only a couple of miles from where we broke down
• The motel was only two blocks from the transmission shop (how often do you find a nice hotel in the middle of a light industrial district?) making it easy to get back and forth
• The motel gave me a big break on the room price and was incredibly helpful with everything we needed
• The attached restaurant was reasonably priced to an incredible degree
• The repair shop's prices were less than 40% of what I expected
• I was able to tie up a lot of loose ends at home by phone and see things just come together without me being directly involved

That's just the highlights. Overall, I benefitted from the delay by getting a new perspective. I'm a bit of a loner. My natural tendency is to try to do everything myself. So this was a real lesson that showed how willing people are to help if I open up to them and approach them with sincerity and gratitude.

Yeah, the delay was inconvenient. But it left me with a refreshing and valuable lesson that applies to any business. Business isn't about YOU. Business isn't about what YOU do. YOU can't make things happen all by yourself. Business is about building relationships and trusting those relationships to lead to the desired results.

And that is a reminder worth far more than what my delay cost.
Jeff