Page 191 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

‘For Every Adversity There is a Seed of Opportunity’
I took the quote in the heading from Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, which I read thirty years ago. Another way of saying it is: one door closes; another door opens. When something goes wrong, some good comes out of it. It’s happened; it happened for a reason, and now we have an opportunity. It takes an adversity to appreciate an opportunity.
When things go wrong, I don’t panic, as I know the situation will pass. The way I see adversity is to imagine a bucket of water. Stick your hand in it and shake it up. The water goes turbulent. Take your hand out, and after a while the water goes calm again. The bad time is past. When in adversity, just think of the bucket and know that things will go calm again. Take a deep breath. Time will pass. An opportunity will develop out of it. Learning will also happen that give us experience for the future.
This was the case with my customer service levels (see Part 2: Chapter 7.1). When I had a complaint, I looked at it as an opportunity to improve our service and grow the business. I made sure the complainant had a face-to-face visit to discuss the problem, or we put our hand in our pocket and just fixed it in quick time. Nine times out of ten I turned dissatisfied customers into advocates of ours.
One big adversity for me was being broke at 32 years old and having a negative bank balance. There was no going back. I had to make things work. If I hadn’t gained the experience of running a business in very adverse times, I wouldn’t have the training that I needed when the big Solatube opportunity came along. OK, myself and family went through
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