Why Pessimism Is Good For Business

Is optimism holding your business back? Let’s talk about why being a little bit of a pessimist can actually help your business thrive in the long term.

Generally speaking, only optimists start their own business. It’s inherent to the very idea of thinking that you can build up a new life for yourself from the ground up to better provide for yourself and your family and to help people.

But you need at least a dash of pessimism to be a bit more of a realist. It’s not about being negative - it’s about understanding the business development and contractor marketing challenges ahead.

The Problem with Pure Optimism

It is very easy to get excited about your business. It is important to get excited about your business. When things are going great, you’re getting your first leads, you’re taking the right steps to grow your business, you’re making customers happy, and your invoices are getting paid - it absolutely makes sense to celebrate those wins.

But sometimes, it gets business owners a little too excited too quickly.

Dreams of growing your business must be tempered by practical business planning.

When you’re only running your business based on your heart and not your brain, you may make short-sighted business decisions, like expanding too quickly, rewarding yourself as a person before paying your business, and not saving operating funds for the slow seasons that happen every year.

Cautious Pessimism Is A Business Safeguard

It’s strange, as someone who spends a lot of time trying to hype up business owners to be excited about their work and active in building their businesses, for me to tell you to take it down a notch.

Let’s not think about this like Debbie Downer-style pessimism. Instead, we are approaching your business from the standpoint of caution - even when we are in times of peak success.

So it’s less “This sucks - everything is awful” and more “We can’t expect the good times to last forever.”

Cautious pessimism helps to remind us to be sustainable as a business for years to come while still allowing ourselves to enjoy and celebrate today’s victories and successes. It helps us to make careful steps and take more educated approaches to how we manage our business.

How Pessimism Can Help Your Business

Many times, contractors and home service pros find great success on a single platform. It’s good to get excited about that - but the next steps one takes from there can reveal whether you’re really about working a job or you’re really about running a business.

If you’re not thinking ahead much past today, then you’ll take that single platform success and spend money on new equipment, stockpiling materials, hiring new people, and maybe rewarding yourself a bit for a job we ll done.

Cautious pessimism reminds us that your business lead flow is great now, but that if you rely exclusively on one single method to attract customers - that you live and die by that one single method.

The exclusively optimistic contractor does well during the boom times. But when the busy season ends, they may be left with high inventory or a few too many staff members on hand than what really makes sense for the business.

The cautiously pessimistic contractor saves up capital for the slower times, re-invests money into marketing and diversifying lead flow, formalizes tracking customer information for future referral and sales opportunities, and overall positions their business for sustained success.

Both contractors experience the same busy seasons, but the cautiously pessimistic contractor makes more calculated moves, knowing that business will be up and down.

Healthy Pessimism: The First Steps

The goal isn’t to demotivate you. Think less emo and more realism.

Healthy pessimists understand that business happens in waves. They do the math on risk and reward and know how to judge that for short-term and long-term success.

If you need help fostering a bit of healthy pessimism, start by taking a look at your historical business data.

If you’re not already doing it, you need to track your customers and business performance. That’s the only way to start to understand the trends that form your business.

Realistic Views Of Your Business Over Time

Looking at your historical business data can help you to understand your peaks and valleys, the times where you need to work it into overdrive because you’ll have more business and the times where you can take a breath.

Diversifying Your Lead Flow

It can also show you where your leads are coming from. Over-reliance on a single income stream can be potentially problematic. If, for example, you do really well with Facebook ads - that’s great! But what happens if Facebook - even in error - shuts down your campaigns for an unforeseen reason?

Even if you can resolve your Facebook Ads issue within a single week (which may be a fast resolution time), that is one week of business leads lost.

Having multiple lead streams, even if they are newer or not as strong, is better for your business.

You don’t have to be great at every lead stream right away, but being aware of where your leads come from and planning ahead for a rainy day or future improvement is a major part of cultivating healthy pessimism.

Driving Your Business With Gas & Brakes

Think of your optimism and excitement for your business as you hit the gas pedal. You can do quite a bit with that optimism to drive your business to new and exciting places. You’ll enjoy your business more as you move your company forward and outpace your competitors.

But you have to slow things down every once in a while. As much as we’d love your business to speed its way to success, the truth is that the road your business drives on has the occasional speed traps, potholes, and construction zones. Your business still needs to be able to move forward in a way that keeps the company safe.

All gas makes a company reckless. All brakes mean a company isn’t going anywhere.

You need both. Grow your business with excitement, and temper your success with the right business development and planning.

You don’t have to be a party pooper. You just need to be smart and think about how successful your business is today and how you can sustain that success in the future.

It’s that balance that helps your business to thrive and grow, through busy times and slow seasons, for years to come.

If you need help finding the balance in your business, the pros at Footbridge Media are here to help. Learn more about how we help contractors.

About Chris Lonergan

Chris Lonergan has over 12 years of contractor marketing experience with Footbridge Media. With a background in web design, print design, content creation, and online marketing, Chris is focused on providing quality marketing and business solutions in the construction and service industries - helping small business owners to more efficiently manage their companies and grow their operations.

Chris Lonergan has previously contributed to and/or been featured in PM Magazine (Plumbing & Mechanical | Contractors x Engineers), theNEWS (ACHR - Air Conditioning | Heating | Refrigeration), Service Roundtable's blog, inPAINT Magazine, the SMB Marketing Agency Show, and the Green Industry Podcast. Chris is also a past SGI/CertainPath breakout session presenter.

About Chris Lonergan