This episode is a treasure trove for leaders hungry for strategies to not just survive but conquer the business battlefield. We lay bare the unspoken truths of industry warfare, debating the vital need for a combative spirit. If the thought of direct confrontation sends shivers down your spine, consider this your wake-up call. We'll guide you through the art of balancing defense and offense in business, ensuring you walk away with the wisdom to know when to stand firm and when to maneuver for longevity and growth.
This episode is a treasure trove for leaders hungry for strategies to not just survive but conquer the business battlefield. We lay bare the unspoken truths of industry warfare, debating the vital need for a combative spirit. If the thought of direct confrontation sends shivers down your spine, consider this your wake-up call. We'll guide you through the art of balancing defense and offense in business, ensuring you walk away with the wisdom to know when to stand firm and when to maneuver for longevity and growth.
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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and we have our special season five guest, dave Nurchi, and we're getting after lessons learned from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and our point today that we are going to talk about is, if you run when you should be fighting, ask if we aren't good enough to win. Should we be in business at all? And this is brought to us by Ditch the Suits, where we focus on helping you get more out of your money and life. Ditch the Suits podcast. Get more information on that. Check out our YouTube page, nqr Media. You can go there. You can see it live in action and get information about your finances, how to make better financial decisions and get more out of your money and life. All right, dave, so I've been talking a lot through the first 16 episodes of the season. I'm going to spin it and let you tell me what's up with this point.
Speaker 2:
All right, yeah, I love this one. I think this is just kind of the essence of business and competition. Right Is, if you're scared of a new business popping up, that's in your industry like, take our industry. And with Seed, the thing I love about Seed and what we do, I would love to have a direct competition with any other advisor or firm out there. I would love to say, meet with a client. And then we'll meet with a client and let them make a decision, because I truly believe we're better than the competition out there and I would never run from that type of head-to-head matchup. I think that's the kind of confidence you need in your people, your business, business and what you're doing. Or you know, like, like the point Ben makes you, why are you in business if you, if you're running away from things?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think, I think Ben is just an absolute animal, right Like he. Just, I mean, his whole demeanor is death, kill or be killed, right. And so when I look at this point from him I don't remember if this is an exact point from him or if I ad-libbed it a little bit, but it doesn't really matter. When you're talking about business and you're talking about what it's going to take to get through the ups and downs of business, and this you know we talk about, you've got to. There's no, there's no shortcut. You can just get in there and do it and you're going to make mistakes, and you know you just got to keep going. You've got to be an animal, you've got to be a fighter.
Speaker 1:
I, you know there there is a point in business where it's no longer time to be the gentleman or or everybody's best friend, and you've got to be the fighter, you've got to be the warrior, otherwise your business goes away. You know, or your position goes away or your team goes away. And you know it's a lot of people don't like confrontation, for instance. You can't be in charge of business if you don't like confrontation. Your business will suffer, your team will suffer. You have to be willing to have, you know, be confrontational. You have to be confident in that. You know you've got these tools like in your bag. I'm going to challenge the status quo. I'm going to. You know I know more about what I'm trying to do than most other people. I'm in the weeds on this. I've got good people around me, that type of thing, and when it's when it's time to fight, you have to fight.
Speaker 1:
And the only reason you shouldn't, I think, have confidence and stick to your guns and really go after it is if you're looking at it going holy shit, we've lost. You know what I mean. We can't win this. And in a second in your head you go we lost. You have to. The next question is should we be in business at all? Should we be at least in this business? You know if, if you can't win, you know and we talk about picking your battles right. So there's, like you know, there's some strategy to this. But in general, from from a standpoint of um, if you're supposed, if you need to fight for your survival and you don't think you're good enough to win, you need to pivot Right.
Speaker 2:
You could lose some battles along the way. Right, that's kind of what you're saying. But, like the war itself, you need to strongly believe you're still going to win the war, even if you lose some battles. That's where you pivot, that's where you make some changes.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I've talked before about how you've got, um, you can have a defensive posture right Cause you've got consider your business, whatever you're really good at, whatever, wherever you're making your money, that's your strong square Right, and so the natural tendency is to protect that. I want to protect this because this is mine. I've already built this. I need to fortify it, and the opposite of that is I'm going to grow the territory, I'm going to go out and get more Right, and there's a balance between growth and you know, kind of protection certainly can't say let's, let's just take all the troops and let's just go straight forward and let's not worry about our rear or our flanks. Right, you got to protect the backside, but part of the way that you protect the backside is by pushing the boundary out right, and so you do want to work on fortifying your situation, but not at the cost of expanding your territory, know, if you want to think about it like that. And so, if you are comfortable, if you grow your business to X point and you're just comfortable with that and you become more of a from a defensive stance, you're just like. You know what. I'm good with what I got. There's no reason anybody's going to take it from me. I'm just going to kind of sit at home and kind of, I'm going to put up this picket fence around me and I'm this is going to be my domain, and you're not paying attention to anything that's going on outside of that fence. By the time you figure out that there's problems, there's a tornado like right on your doorstep right, and it's just like one of these things where, like, okay, you can be defensive, you can step back. You could say, okay, why do I need to be aggressive? But you have to realize that there's a world around you that doesn't care about your disposition. The world around you is just happening and there will come a point and you see it with careers all the time, people's careers get destroyed, you know, after 20 years, because the industry changes and they're not needed anymore, or something like that, and they act like a victim and it's like, look, nothing stays the same and you might have to fight. You might have to fight for your career, or you might have to fight for your position, or you might have to justify the fact that you're there once in a while and when you, while and when you and when you have to do that, you got to do it, you're going to be all in, and if you don't believe in the fact that you should be there, that you have a right to be there, if you don't have the confidence, the second, you don't have that confidence. You got to ask yourself maybe I shouldn't be here at all, maybe I should go in a completely different direction. Right, right, if I own business, maybe I shouldn't own a business, maybe I should work for somebody. Um, if you know I'm in a particular field, maybe I shouldn't be in the field, maybe I should change fields, maybe I should skill up and do something different, that type of thing. You know, it was really interesting.
Speaker 1:
This morning I was looking at Facebook and I saw a quote from a coach that I had in high school. I saw a quote from a coach that I had in high school and this is from like a couple of decades ago. He posted this. I think At least one or two decades ago he posted this and for some reason it's just like I don't know if he reposted it now or it's repeating, but he had gone to a conference of baseball coaches in Tennessee, in Nashville, tennessee, and this is the story that he had about this this. At the time, the 78 year old man they brought up on the stage talked to all these 4,000 baseball coaches and he just talking nonsense and everybody starts kind of like cackling him after a while and finally he says okay, well, and he's got like around his neck. He's wearing as as this is described by the person who posted it. He's got a baseball diamond around his neck, like a real baseball diamond, and he goes. Any of you know how big the cross the baseball diamond is in Little League, and they're like 17 inches. And he goes okay, how about in Babe Ruth League? They're like 17 inches. He goes modified baseball, high school baseball, varsity, you know college baseball, minor league baseball, professional baseball, it's always the home plate is the same size, no matter what level of baseball you're in, and he goes.
Speaker 1:
What do you do when somebody, when a pitcher, can't throw the ball over the plate and get strikes? He goes. You don't change the size over the plate and get strikes he goes. You don't change the size of the the plate. You tell the pitcher that he's either gonna get better or he's gonna change positions. Yeah, right, so you don't make it easier just because the competition gets tougher or just because you know they move in each, each phase of baseball. They move the home plate farther away from the pitcher's mound or whatever. Right, they don't go. Oh, it's so hard. I guess we'll have a 20-inch plate, and that's the moral of the story, is there's going to be times where, if you want to be in the game, you're going to have to fight, and the only way that you're going to be able to fight and win and bring people along with you, as if you have confidence, and if you don't have confidence, go do something else.
Speaker 2:
Yes, you could look at the fight as an opportunity, then, to either get better and keep kind of honing in on your craft, improve, keep beating your competition, or it's an opportunity to pivot right and go in our direction.