Strategic Business Opportunities

Episode 951: Strategic Business Opportunities, with Jennifer Peek

Strategic business opportunities, a podcast with our guest, Jennifer Peek. Learn how to find and double down on strategic business opportunities.

Jennifer Peek provides clients with key strategic insights while helping them develop plans to profitably execute their visions. At Peek Advisory Group, she consults with business owners identifying business gaps and strategic business opportunities to increase value and prepare them for the next stage of business evolution from growth to varied exit strategies.

What you will learn from this episode about strategic business opportunities:

• How Jennifer left her corporate career ten years ago and started her own company, Peek Advisory Group, bringing corporate experience to small and midsized companies
• Why the type of economic and social recovery we will see in a post-COVID world is impossible to anticipate
• Why developing the right mindset, seeking out strategic business opportunities, and doubling down can help you through this crisis
• How the lens you view the world through determines your outlook, and why the widespread belief that businesses are all in survival mode isn’t always the case
• Why the Harvard Business Review’s article Roaring Out of Recession is worth reading, especially during this challenging time
• Jennifer explains her “opportunistic mindset” and shares the importance of expanding your social outreach efforts
• Why you don’t want to be losing ground or staying stagnant during this crisis, and why you want to work to position your business to capitalize on opportunities in the future
• Why recognizing your clients’ or customers’ changing habits can help you develop new product and service offerings in the future.
• Why this is the ideal time to be doubling down on content and on reaching out to new potential clients with helpfulness as part of your strategic business opportunities
• Why the most important lesson Jennifer learned from a mentor over the course of her career is the need for a willingness to shut everything down and start over

Resources:

• Harvard Business Review’s Roaring Out of Recession: https://hbr.org/2010/03/roaring-out-of-recession
• Website: http://businessvaluequiz.com
• Website: https://peekadvisory.com/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferjpeek/
• Read this blog and achieve growth through strategic business opportunities

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Listen to this podcast with David Baker on his journey in finding strategic business opportunities

 

 

Strategic Business Opportunities: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success in chasing strategic business opportunities from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. In fact, my team at predictive ROI, we’ve been talking about it for a while now. We’ve recently rebuilt and continue to build out our free resources library on PredictiveROI.com, so you can now download free practical and tactical guides for how to build your own authority sales machine.

 

Everything you need in order to build out your client avatar. How to create a value ladder, a sales funnel. How to make sure your content strategy aligns with the ten truths to what makes someone an authority within their niche. Just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources and as always, everything you request. We will send it right to your inbox. 

 

Before we welcome today’s very special guest, Jennifer Peek, let me share some additional context. When Jennifer and I were getting ready for this conversation, I just knew that this was going to be something that was going to be over the top. Helpful. This is going to be one of those conversations Onward Nation that’ll be like, holy bananas. That was rock solid. Awesome. And here’s why. So Jennifer provides clients with strategic insights while helping them develop plans to profitably execute their visions.

 

Now, let me put an asterisk there because her firm, which is named Peek Advisory Group, went on the surface, sound like, well, I can’t imagine they’re doing that now. And that’s not the case. So what you’re going to hear from Jennifer are some really, like in the trenches insights of what she sees her clients doing today and what they’re advising their clients through.

 

And I will tell you that a lot of it has to do with mindset. So when we get into crisis mode, yes, it’s absolutely okay, I’m going to stop, I’m going to freeze, I’m not going to take any action. And that will somehow make me safe. But the reality is, we need to be thinking about how we can be even more helpful during this time, how we can be even more helpful to clients, prospects, and so forth.

 

Is there some retrenching that’s necessary? And you’ll hear Jennifer talk about that? Sure. Of course there is. Do we need to be even that much more diligent in managing cash flow? Of course, that makes you a responsible business owner, but there are also strategic business opportunities. And if we don’t allow ourselves to think strategically, which is one of Jennifer’s gifts, if we don’t allow ourselves to think strategically, then we’re going to also miss the opportunity.

 

And there are some during this crisis. So this is going to be one of those conversations Onward Nation that you’re going to be able to walk out of and say, okay, that was a great strategic insight from Jennifer. I’m going to take it and I’m going to apply today because we will be better for it if I take action on that.

 

So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Jennifer. 

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Jennifer Peek’s Introduction

 

Thank you. It’s great to be here. Well, it is great to have you here. Thank you for saying yes. And before we dive in with what I’m sure is going to feel like a litany or a barrage of questions coming your way, because I’m very much looking forward to sharing your insights Onward Nation.

 

Before we do that, actually take us behind the curtain here and give us some more context. You know, beyond the bio, beyond your experience. Take us and give us more context into you, to your path, your journey, and then we’ll dive in. Okay, great. Well, I started my company about ten years ago and did that after I left a corporate career.

 

So I took, to go into the details a little bit, but basically took the components of my corporate career and my experience and built a company around that, doing what I love to do the most. And, and it really was taking the large company experience where we looked at mergers and acquisitions and company value, customer mix, product mix and profitability and started offering that to our smaller to mid-sized business customers and and doing so in a way that was strategic in nature, but also easily implementable by a smaller size company.

 

And we focus on accounting and finance. But our viewpoint is that those are simply lenses through which you can look at your business. It’s an additional way to reflect on your operations and how you’re executing on a day to day basis, and really helping our business owners use financial metrics and elements as more insightful tools, as opposed to just ten days after the month is over, I get my income statement and you know, it’s already way too late for me to do anything about that.

 

So we’re really helping our customers, our business owners, our clients try to be more insightful with their data and just have their financials really confirm what they already know about their company. Okay. So that tells me that if I am a progressive business owner and I’m thinking about, okay, what strategic transactions might I make, what new markets could I enter?

 

How do I build out either product line, service line? How do I expand my team? How do I double down on R&D, you know, whatever their business model is. But with the end state being, you know, at some point I want to be able to sell my business either or maybe do I want to acquire another company to kind of, you know, bolt on to the existing model.

 

But maybe at some point I want to be able to exit the business. It sounds like that’s an end state for a business owner. Now, granted, given today’s condition, maybe that’s modified or maybe there’s an asterisk there, but if I want to be able to sell my business at some point, it sounds like your team, those are the types of things that you are advising on, am I correct?

 

Yes, that’s correct. And I would broaden it a little bit to say, you know, our goal is to help our business owners have options for exit. And that could be selling to a completely unrelated third party or to a strategic, you know, aligned business. It could be an employee sale, it could be a family transition. It could also just be making sure that the current business owner has the means to not be as heavily involved on a day to day basis.

 

Maybe they have a passion project that they want to go work on for a year. and it’s just making sure our business owners have those options. When and if any of those strategic business opportunities present themselves. 

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Economic Slowdown 

 

Love it. Okay. Excellent context. Before we dive into, so Onward Nation, just a little bit behind the curtain here before we hit record, in general, Jennifer and I were talking about, you know, some of the things that she’s seen, you know, in the field, in the trenches, working with clients.

 

You know, we were talking about a couple of differences. And there’s some interesting juxtaposition here between the two mindsets that she is seeing right now. But before we do that, let’s also maybe again, set some foundational context here, because the crisis, the challenge that we’re working through right now presented by Covid is different than the quote unquote, traditional kind of economic slowdown, right?

 

I mean, because we didn’t have those leading economic indicators. Right? So that’s what’s making this really hard for business owners to grapple with, right Jennifer? Absolutely, absolutely. And in a lot of ways, it’s affected many industries exactly the same way, which is different also than what you see in a normal economic slowdown. So there is, I’m sure the answer to this is no, but you know, it’s on the minds of every business owner.

 

Like at what point and will we see a V-shaped recovery? Will we see a U-shaped recovery? Is it going to be well, is it going to be some other dynamic shape. And like how long? I mean, there’s really no like just because we didn’t have any leading indicators going into it. You know, maybe it’s just the momentum sort of the mindset of the business owner community as a whole.

 

But there’s really no way to sort of predict the end to this, is there? No, there’s not. And really what I’ve talked to my clients about and the only thing that you can probably predict with some level of certainty is that you should expect, whatever the quote unquote, recovery is, to be rocky and probably a little bit more volatile than what you’re used to seeing.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Navigating Your Team Through the Crisis

 

Yeah. And so okay, so let me take your lead there or let me follow your lead, I should say. And so then that tells me that if I’m a business owner, doing my best to manage my way, sort of navigate our team and company through this crisis. Yes, I need to, you know, stay on top of whatever the current data points are and so forth and set our Northstar, our mission for the business.

 

Two years, three years, five years. Whatever the time frame is. But I also have to recognize the fact that because it’s going to be rocky, that there’s going to be some ebb and flow, the destination doesn’t change, but the path is probably going to change a bunch, right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so give us some context when you talk about the two interesting mindsets that set up the two mindsets.

 

And we’ll kind of slice as a part to get some additional context around each of them. But take us through the two interesting mindsets that you’re seeing right now. Definitely. So I’m going to label these but try not to get too hung up on the words that I use. Right. One is really kind of the hermit hunkering down.

 

I’m just going to stay steady and come out on the other side. We’re not going to make any massive decisions. We’re not going to look for areas of inefficiency or opportunity or just, you know, very kind of let’s all get in the cave and shut the door. Then the other, when I see it, is more of the opportunistic mindset and not in a bad way, but in a way, hey, maybe we have some extra time where we could look at some of those projects that we put on the back burner.

 

Let’s get those off of our plate so we’ll be even more ready when the activity picks up. But I also have several customers that are looking at, you know, how do they expand their market share? Is this a good time to test a new product? Is this a good time to consider changes in their customer mix, you know, elements that they were already thinking about, but hadn’t implemented for any variety of reasons, you know, not the least of which is we’re so busy doing the day-to-day work that we don’t have time to test out some of these strategic ideas.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Hermit and Opportunistic Mindsets

 

And, you know, one of the things that we were talking about is that it’s interesting because I can have the same exact business owner, have both of those mindsets on any given day. That is one of the things that I think is probably the most challenging for business owners right now is you kind of need to have both of those mindsets on any given day, and it’s trying to figure out the balance between them, when it’s to your strategic advantage to adopt one position or another.

 

And the reality of it is, if you have a variety of customers or products or services inside your company, one of those positions may be true for part of your company, while the other mindset is appropriate for a different element of your company. And really taking a moment to think about what your strategic business opportunities are. And is there a good blend of those two mindsets?

 

It is a unique space that we’re in right now. Okay, this is exceptional. We’re going to have a lot of learning strategic business opportunities with what Jennifer just shared with Onward Nation. So let’s go back through and unpack it, slice it apart, whatever sort of metaphor you want to use. So with hermit and opportunistic, love the names, by the way.

 

It’s really cool. Okay. But why do you categorize them? Why do you label them as mindsets? because I think it starts there as most things do, to be honest, it really that mindset drives how you’re approaching problem solving. It drives how you’re approaching, managing your employees, how you’re talking to your customers, how you’re potentially negotiating with vendors, how you’re even thinking about.

 

Right, like you’re a one to five year plan. If your mindset is that of a hermit, it influences every other action and conversation that you’re having and it’s not just like the world’s ending kind of idea. It’s the fact that it’s I’m, you know, I’m not going to pursue any conversation that looks like growth because I’m just in survival mode.

 

The opportunistic conversations sound a lot more. Let’s work together. How do we partner on this? How do I make sure that my employees stay engaged? How do I make sure that I’m staying engaged with my customers and my vendors? so that we continue to have those relationships, which will be critical to any future conversation that you need to have.

 

And so I think it really starts with your viewpoint and your mindset on how you’re approaching anything that you’re taking action on in your business. It’s really outstanding what you just shared there, because it illustrates how pervasive, good or bad, the lens is, which is either tainted or super clear. So if your mindset is either askew or whatever your mindset is at, it literally will affect it can’t not affect decisions going forward.

 

Right? Absolutely. It can’t not affect it in any way and in little it could be in little tiny ways. I mean that’s the tricky thing about mindset, right, is that it sneaks up on you and it colors your language. And even the simplest of conversations that you don’t really think have a lot of impact. But ultimately, it all does.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Getting The Right Mindset

 

I was having a conversation the other day when, with another business owner, I believe, sorry that the conversations just kind of run together, phone calls and emails and so forth and the person asked me, like, you know, when do you think it’ll be over? And of course, you know, who knows, right? I mean, we just can’t say, it’ll be July 8th.

 

You know, nobody can say that. But, you know, my answer to that person, I said, I think largely that it will be over when business owners have had enough. Now, set aside the public safety and health risk, which obviously has to be mitigated and worked through. So I’m not trying to sound disrespectful to that. We all have friends, family members who are in the at risk category.

 

So please don’t mistake what I’m saying, but what I am saying from an economic perspective, like when business owners really, truly like to get into the right mindset, is what Jennifer is talking about and and truly say, you know what, I’m doubling down. I’m seeking out those strategic business opportunities. I’m getting the right mindset. And I’m done playing passive.

 

That’s when I think we’ll see some momentum. Now maybe Jennifer, you can have a completely different point of view. And so awesome because that too would be a learning opportunity. Tell me what you think. Well, I like the way that you phrased that. And I think your point and I don’t want to prescribe something into what you mean.

 

That isn’t valid. So you can correct me if I’m mistaken, but the way I look at it is when business owners sort of stop waiting on the paradigm to be defined for them and start defining it for themselves, that’s when I think you see the momentum change. Awesome. Yep. Well said. So much better said than what I said.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: The Metaphor of Lens

 

Oh yeah, I had the benefit of listening to you describe it first. And so it’s always easier to go second. But it’s interesting how you’ve used the metaphor of lens. And here’s why I say that. again, you know, I’m either talking to business owners every day or emailing back and forth or whatever, and somebody asked me like, hey, how are you doing?

 

You know, how do I predict tomorrow? I’m like, we’re okay. I mean, we certainly took our lumps early on in the process. We’ve doubled down in certain areas. We got people. We’re managing it well. We’re doing everything and still moving forward and investing in the right areas. Okay. Things are okay. All right. Literally no joke, Jennifer. 

 

That person replied to me and said I’m glad to hear that you’re in survival mode. And I’m like, what? And so I literally went back to my email and reread it and I’m like, I did. I thought survival mode did it because I was kind of in a hurry right? And what did I say? Did I say that?

 

And so when you said what you said a few minutes about the lens that triggered for me, I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s how powerful the lens is. Because that person interpreted what I said, which is all positive we’re moving forward to. They’re in survival mode. Yeah, it’s very interesting. I agree, and powerful, but because it taints everything, potentially taints everything, it absolutely does.

 

And I think it’s interesting that you say that when you tell me what you replied to this person with and then their response to you, I think there is a general belief that everyone in the business community is in survival mode. You know, unless you’re zoom, right, unless you own some sort of platform that’s just exploded by virtue of the fact that everybody is remotely communicating.

 

Right. I think everybody thinks you’re either out of business, because you’re in the trap. Maybe you’re in the travel industry. Let’s use that as an example. Right. You’re either really in it or you’re surviving. But in general, nobody can just be okay. And it’s very interesting. And the other thing that I think is interesting is does that mean that the relative size of the recovery has to be that much greater because of this perception that we’re all in survival mode, right?

 

Does it have to be dramatic? What if it’s just gradual? Great observation. You know, I don’t know the answer to that wonderful question, but it’s interesting to me, right. This does the coming out of it have to be dramatic, as dramatic as the going into it for it to get people to move, you know, okay.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Roaring Out of a Recession

 

So like when you and I were bantering back and forth in the green room again before the recording and you said something along those lines. Although what you just said added some additional meat to it, which is awesome. That made me think that an article that was published in the Harvard Business Review now might seem a little bit weird, Onward Nation, that I’m referencing this because it was published in March of 2010.

 

And the reason so obviously ten years ago, but the reason why I’m referencing it is because the authors of this study went back and looked at data points across 4700 companies across the last six global recessions in order to predict, you know, going forward next time there’s a crisis, how do we better not only survive the crisis, but using their words, how do we come roaring out of a recession and so on?

 

If you Google roaring out of a recession, you know, like lion roaring, roaring out of a recession Harvard Business Review, you’ll find it. And it’s a specter killer because that absolutely speaks to what Jennifer’s talking about right now. And that is, you know, with the sort of the hermit and the opportunistic, which we’ll get to opportunistic here in just a second.

 

Are there strategic business opportunities to make progressive decisions, being conservative in drawing down operating expenses, not laying off teams, your talent because you need your talent to survive and to thrive, but then doubling down on R&D, marketing, other strategic business opportunities that she was alluding to before. And we’ll get into here in just a second. And when you do what then how do you exit the recession?

 

And there is plenty of data. The data is clear. The company is to follow this opportunistic mindset, as Jennifer’s talking about come roaring out and they leave the competitors behind. It’s a compelling study on ruination. I hope you read it. So, Jennifer, would you take us into the opportunistic mindset and why you call it opportunistic? Certainly. You know, I think opportunistic sometimes has a negative connotation, but when I talk about it, what I’m really referring to is some of those elements that you just listed.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Regaining Your Momentum

 

Right. And it’s the, there’s strategic business opportunities to expand your social outreach, whether that be on social media, whether that be and having your employees who are currently not doing what they were doing before picking up the phone and calling their customers. I’ll give you an example that is more to my personal life than it is to my business life.

 

Right. But I belong, I’m a member of the local OrangeTheory Fitness, and it, along with most gyms, has been closed down for some time. But I got a personal phone call from one of the instructors, and, you know, she was just checking in. We’re just checking in with all the members and she’s clearly not training.

 

Certainly not at the level that she was before. We do have zoom training. but, you know, that’s an opportunity for her to reach out. And I’m sure the other coaches were doing it as well. You could have your employees doing the same thing, you know, reaching out to past customers, current customers, just checking in with them, you know, maintaining those relationships.

 

There’s, you know, one of the things that I don’t think that we know right now is how many new habits our customers are forming when we’re not watching. Brilliant. And really maintaining those relationships is going to be critical when we come out of this. The other element of that idea is you don’t want to have to spend all of your money, grand reopening your brand and your business with your existing customers.

 

If you’ve gone dark on them for three months. And you know, that’s certainly relative to what type of company you have. But I think it’s something to keep in mind that everybody had a big disruption to their routines and had to create new patterns, and you want to make sure that you’re staying and in their mind, somehow, even if it’s just on the edges, you know. 

 

The other reality of it is that there’s going to be some companies that exit their current business. That provide some strategic business opportunities from customer expansion, possibly from a product expansion, maybe even from an acquisition viewpoint, where you can acquire a whole company

 

If you were so inclined to do that. The, the biggest thing and I think this is part of what you’re talking about when you were referring to that article, is you don’t want to be losing ground during this period of time. And in all honesty, you probably don’t want to be staying stagnant either. You want to be well positioned when the strategic business opportunities are available tomorrow, next week, next month to capitalize on those.

 

And that doesn’t have to be some massive growth cycle, but it certainly is an opportunity to regain your momentum. One of the biggest things that I’ve talked to my clients about is that we can’t lose all of our momentum. Inertia is a real thing in business and in life, and if you have to restart from a dead stop, that’s going to be very hard and it’s going to cost you critical time resources, whether that be employees or money or relationships.

 

And so I think you, you want to be proactive from that standpoint. You want to do it in a very economically advised way but all of those things are still true. Okay. That is super wise. And so there’s again, some really big nuggets here that, let’s break down further. I think it’s brilliant how you said so.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Staying in Touch with Clients and Customers

 

I was trying to get this in my notes, as quickly as I could. So how many new habits are your customers forming as a result of this? So I think where I’m going with that, but please correct me. So let’s add some additional context here. I think what you’re saying is that okay, staying in touch with your clients and your customers and learning what these new habits are, could that potentially lead?

 

And maybe it doesn’t, but could that potentially lead to a new product offering new service offering? How could you be more helpful with the new habits? Am I tracking you? Absolutely, yeah, it’s just awesome. But if we never ask the question, how would we know, right? Right. Well, you’ll know because three months from now, your customers will stop buying.

 

Okay. Fair point. Which is not the way you want to find out. No, but. Oh, okay. So then, some context of the coach, the fitness coach calling you, is to check in on your wellness, all of that. Just checking. But is there any sort of intel gathering or is it not that from your perspective?

 

So I didn’t talk to her. I actually just got a voicemail. But let me tell you what else OrangeTheory Fitness has done. So there’s a private Facebook group page for our location. but then Orange Theory itself started posting workout videos everyday to YouTube as a franchise form and they’re posted every day.

 

And so it doesn’t matter whether you’re a member of OrangeTheory or not, all of those workouts are available to you, and they have other things in place already with heart rate monitors and gamification elements that I think really keep people engaged even when they’re not in the studio. I never used any of those things unless I was actually in a class at OrangeTheory.

 

But I’ve started using them extensively since we can’t visit in person and the coaches are posting on Facebook and posting on other forms of social media just to keep that engagement up. And I don’t think they did it before, but I will tell you, even if they did, I wasn’t watching and now I am.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Customers Will Come Back If They Know Your Value

 

And so if you want to talk about different habits that I’m forming about something that’s just really not honestly that big a part of my life, it can be that small scale and I am much more likely to go back there once we are able to do that. Well, and that’s the point, right? Of all of the proof points and examples that you could have chosen, you chose that one.

 

And it’s a great one. It’s a great one. You chose that one even though it’s not, you know, this big piece, but it is super relevant and it’s a great illustration of what you’re talking about as far as doing the grand reopening go and they’ve gone dark. It’s not like your local franchise needs to reintroduce themselves.

 

It’s not like they need to send you an email and say, well, Jennifer, guess what we opened up. It’s time to get back to that working out mindset because they’ve done an excellent job of staying top of mind, right? Absolutely. And I think that, you know, depending upon what your businesses are, the less required it is for your customer, the more you’re going to need to do that, right?

 

You can make the argument that people should exercise. But I have lots of different ways to do that. Right. I can do it at my house. I could go to a different gym. I could, you know, all different kinds. So it’s not required that I belong to that gym. And I think there are a lot of elective elements in all of our customers’ lives that relate to our businesses that we really need to be aware of.

 

I think we all like to think that we’re an essential component to our customers’ lives, but that’s probably true for everything. Not every service that you offer or every customer that you offer it to. Well, in what I’m thinking about in our earlier conversation, both in the green room as well as during an interview when we were talking about opportunism, you know, you framed it as well.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Be Helpful Instead of Selling

 

This could be, you know, a great time to take market share, to introduce yourself to new customers and so forth. And from a content perspective, it sounds like OrangeTheory has really doubled down on that. Now we’ll see if it pays off for them. Once people can go back to gyms, like will they retain their existing members and then also acquire new members?

 

My guess is yes, because they’ve been so thoughtful about being helpful. This is the time Onward Nation to be helping and not selling. And it sounds like they have absolutely been lockstep in that in their content strategy. Right? Jennifer. Yes, they are a great case study. So when the next one gets written by Harvard Business Review about what happened during the Covid crisis, maybe they’ll be included in it.

 

But very much so. And, and they’ve, you know, they’ve modified a little bit as they have, as they’ve gone forward, you know, from 4 to 6 weeks ago. but the accessibility hasn’t changed. And I think that’s critical. Love that. Okay. So let’s shift gears, a little bit. And because you have obviously been providing us with great mentorship, love that.

 

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Strategic Business Opportunities: Influential Lesson From a Mentor

 

So I want to kind of turn the tables, if you don’t mind, turn the tables off of the mentorship topic on you and ask you to share with us. So, Jennifer, what would you consider to be the most influential lesson that you ever learned from one of your mentors? Because you’ve been a great mentor here during this conversation.

 

So what’s been the most influential lesson that you ever learned from one of your mentors? And then how did that help you become the business owner, the strategist that you are today? You know, it’s interesting, I was thinking about this question and there’s so many different things I could say, but the one that really comes to mind is the willingness to basically shut it down and start a and not because that’s what you would choose to do.

 

But I think if you ask yourself that question, you will get different answers than if you said, well, how do I fix the business that I have? One is a very dynamic and exponential answer, and then the other one is very incremental. And I think we solve a lot of problems in business on an incremental basis.

 

And it’s usually appropriate. Right. Usually you don’t have to blow the whole thing up. But if you ask the question about blowing the whole thing up or a related question is if I took everything that I knew now and was able to start a company from scratch, what would I do? and those have really helped me kind of get out of a particular track and thinking, you know, some of it’s mindset, some of it’s also just not asking yourself the right questions, which ultimately those things are connected.

 

But it’s really finding that thing that will jolt you out of your stuck patterns of thought. when you’re trying to think strategically. Well, when you just said jolted. So I’m thinking of the hermit as you describe the hermit before, and you said getting the cave shut the door, and now I’m thinking of the oh, wait a minute.

 

I’m kind of a hermit sitting in the dark, dank, cold cave. And I’m sitting there thinking about your strategic question limit. What? What if everything changed? What if? But I was in control of it. What if I changed everything about the business? Then. Then no longer am I fearful in the cave. Now I can open the door to the cave and confidently exit the cave, because I have the mindset of then of being opportunistic and thinking, wait a minute, maybe this businesses needed to change for years and we just didn’t have the courage to do it, or the resources to do it, or the long list of things why it wasn’t done. 

 

But if I ask myself the question that you just posed, that could be a game changer, right? Definitely. And I love the way that you phrased that, because it’s taking what could be essentially the same situation and just asking the question from a different perspective. I told you Onward Nation that that’s what she was going to do.

 

And she did. That was awesome. Jennifer. Really, really sincerely. This has been a great, great conversation. You were extremely helpful to Onward Nation business owners. and I appreciate the mentorship, too, in this conversation. It was just fantastic. Before we go, because I want to be respectful of your time, I know that you have a compressed schedule before we go, before we close out and say goodbye. Any final advice that you want to share? Anything you think we might have missed on strategic business opportunities? And then please tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you. 

 

Achieve growth through strategic business opportunities by learning from this blog

 

Strategic Business Opportunities: Last Advice and How to Connect with Jennifer

 

Certainly. Well, I think we covered a lot, so I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that we haven’t covered. You know, I think that your audience Onward Nation are probably already among the most resilient and adaptable business owners out there.

 

And I think those are two mindset skills that will serve them well. Now, next week, three years from now. I think those are certainly critical. And, you know, I just encourage everybody to kind of have that, as a way to function and really, you know, kind of keeping an eye on your mindset is a big deal.

 

I can sneak up on you. So really, otherwise, I think we covered lots of different things in our conversation. I enjoyed it as well. As far as connecting with me, the two best ways to do that are on our website, which is PeekAdvisory.com. There’s a contact button. You can look at our services and know some case studies and lots of blog posts that are accessible by everybody.

 

And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Jennifer Peek and I are available there. I have a lot of content that goes out there as well that I’d be delighted for you to to take a look at, interact with me, to connect with me and I look forward to, you know, meeting some of you virtually awesome no matter how many notes you took.

 

And I hope you took a bunch. I took four pages of notes from Jennifer. This is just absolutely rock solid. Awesome. The key is, though, and no matter how many times you go back and listen to her words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. But the key is you have to take what she so generously shared with you, take it and apply it and accelerate your results because of it.

 

And Jennifer, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And again, I am extremely grateful that you said yes, came on to the show to be our mentor, to be our guide, to help us move our businesses onward to the next level and help us market our way and navigate our way through this crisis. You’re just awesome.

 

So thank you very, very much, Jennifer. Thank you. This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

Achieve growth through strategic business opportunities by learning from this blog