Greg's Right FIT #521 – This week: Momentum, Good ideas, Butter

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

• Thoughts on Momentum in 2026
• Being Human
• Random Stuff

Thoughts on Momentum in 2026

• We see successful people and think "now there goes a motivated person." We see struggling people and think "What they need is a little motivation." We don't think much about environmental factors. When we ignore these people's motivation and look at what's in their environments instead, we get closer to helping them. It's how we get momentum going, or keep it going.
• Fixing an unhappy customer isn't perceived by the customers as a good experience. Being the easiest to work with is. Take a minute to come up with ways to reduce the effort required to do business with you. Starting with customer experience may be out of step with the times, but it still works.
• Familiarity may breed contempt, but better the devil you know than the one you don't. Getting prospects to leave an existing vendor providing a service is harder than getting them to add a brand new service. Check your pipeline report for replacement or new, and adjust sales cycles accordingly.
• Familiarity can be gamed. Researchers have shown that exposure to the same message over time not only helps with recognizing the message, it also builds trust in the mind of the recipient. That said, test your messages before putting them on heavy repeat. A bad idea promoted effectively is still a bad idea.

Being Human – Good ideas

"Action expresses priorities." – Mahatma Gandhi

Digging through some old notes, I ran into this. It's a quick framework for evaluating ideas on the fly. You know, like when someone comes up and says something like, "What if we got into this new line of business?" It's intriguing, but where should it placed on the big priority list? Do you dig in? Dismiss? Shelf for a later time?

Here's the diagram:

Rank the idea on a scale of 1 to 5 in three areas:
Beliefs: How does this idea sit with our beliefs and values?
Outcomes: If this idea works, are the outcomes something that we want?
Resources: Do we have the resources needed to bring this idea to light?

Three questions to orient and evaluate the new idea. If you don't have the resources (#1), the idea won't fly - it's roadkill. If it doesn't match your firm's beliefs (#2) it probably won't get buy in. And if you aren't excited by the outcomes (#3), the implementation won't build momentum.

It works. Quick, simple, and effective. Try it on with this idea:

"We should just buy our biggest competitor."

Good stuff.

Random Stuff

"As young as I look,
I'm growing older faster than he.
Seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.

Whatever the number,
I will pass them one day
and take the lead,
the way I do on our walks in the woods.

And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass."
– A Dog on His Master, Bill Collins

This morning I ate a piece a fruit.

For most of the week I've been living off of butter and sugar in various forms. It started last week when I made chocolate chip cookies. I had a craving and we had the ingredients so I grabbed a recipe and went to work. I have never made cookies by myself, and only made one mistake. I left 1/2 the sugar out of the butter creaming process. I threw it in late, leaving the cookies with an unexpected texture, but they were great.

Then the parties started. Cookies, cookies, cookies. And then my youngest arrived. He and my lovely bride have a tradition of making Christmas cookies in three varieties. Wonderful combinations of butter and sugar in each. This year they only made two of their regular offerings, but I stuck to my tradition of eating three times more cookies than anyone should.

It's in this heightened sugary, caffeinated, buttery state that I am reading Billy Collins poems about dogs. And crying. And stuffing my face into the face of Wilson the Amazing Border Collie. Dogs are great. Billy Collins is great. It's a lot to sort through in my butter-stuffed state.

So, I'm hitting the fruit bowl. Transitional sugar to get me through to the New Year.

Then it's all protein, baby. Eggs and beef and. . .well, whatever else has protein. I'll be a new man. A hard man. Not this mushy pile of flesh begging for poochie kisses.