Lifting
I love lifting weights. Running is fine, elliptical machines are great, but I love to lift weights. Lifting pushes the boundaries of your body by stressing muscles to "failure"; the point at which your can lift no more. Lifting requires practice. Lifting requires focus. Lifting requires rest to allow muscles to repair, get strong, and prepare to lift again.
Sound familiar? It sounds like last week to me. We pushed our staff, our endurance, our operational systems to failure during a large auction we host three times per year. You have certainly pushed your fall harvest operational systems to failure on crazy October Saturdays.
It requires focus to make it through those busy days, and I'm sure you were ready to rest when it was done. You probably found that the next weekend, you were stronger, your staff was better, and you were more readily able to handle the crowds.
Supporting Muscles
As you train to get stronger lifting weights, you inevitably hit a plateau; a level at which you cannot realize the gains in strength you used to achieve. You get stuck.
I was in an airport, as I routinely am this time of year as I travel to visit new clients, and I picked up a magazine (I think it was Men's Health). In it, the writer was talking about breaking through exercise plateaus.
Here are the basics. Your body is smarter than you. As you build strength in a particular exercise, your body will limit the maximum weight you can lift based on the strength of your supporting muscles.
For instance, I was making great gains in curls, the classic exercise in which you build your bicep muscles by lifting a weight from your waist to your chin bending your arm at the elbow. Then, I hit a plateau. I simply couldn’t get my maximum weight to increase for weeks.
The author of the article said that the limiting muscles for curls are not your biceps, but actually the supporting muscles in your shoulders. My body knows that each arm cannot safely curl more than a 50 lb dumbell until the shoulder muscles are strengthened to support the extra load. The article outlined the exercises needed to strengthen my shoulders to allow me to keep improving.
What does all this have to do with running your business? It never occurred to me that my shoulders could be holding back my biceps from reaching their full potential. The same is true for your business. You have major "muscle groups" that you have built to be big and powerful, but your business growth will plateau if you neglect your supporting “muscles”.
For us, we have our admission & introduction system. We are the best in the world at processing people through our front gate. We have mazes, again the best in the world. (Humility might be a weakness…) With such a great system, we put lots of people in the park, which requires a lot of high-functioning staff to run the system and take care of guests.
The supporting muscles that we’ve neglected are our staff training systems. If my staff training “muscles” are not exercised, nourished, and grown it won’t matter how many people we can push into the park. The guests will not receive the best experience from under-trained staff.
Weak supporting muscles can bring the whole system down. When that happens in weightlifting, you get injured. When it happens in business, you get injured by losing guests, money, and your reputation.
This week I challenge you to look first for your powerful muscle groups. What do you really well? What is always easy? Where are you powerful? What makes you great?
Which supporting muscles are weak? Your food service? Your parking? Your farm market? Your maze? Your training? Your recruiting? Your landscaping? Your cash registers?
Choose one or two for this season and strengthen them. The investment of time and energy spent building your supporting muscles will pay off as you allow your core strengths to grow unfettered.
Have a great week. - Hugh
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