“During this recession, a third of your businesses will die, a third will barely survive, and a third will thrive.” I HEARD THIS in an Entrepreneurs’ Organization Portland Chapter monthly learning event with keynote speaker Mark Moses of Make Big Happen in at the beginning of the Great Recession. e room was laser-focused on what he had to say and let out a collective gasp as the reality of the statement hit the business owners in the room. At the time, the organization was called Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and the average age of the group was . So most had never experienced a recession — especially one with all your chips on the table. I raised my hand and asked, “How can I be in the last group?” I will never forget what Mark said. “I know you all spend most of your time working on your company’s biggest problems,” he said. “ at is human, but all you have when you work on a big problem is a slightly less big problem. Instead of spending time doing that, nd what is going right in your business. I guarantee you that something is. Find that and spend your time doing more of that.” Reality Check: Not Much Was Going Right On my drive back to the o ce, I tried to think of what was going right, and I could not think of a single thing. The Great Recession was a real-estate-driven recession, and we owned industrial business parks up and down the West Coast that catered to smaller businesses. e small businesses were failing, vacating and not paying rent. We had bought most of them in the last few years to remodel or refresh and then put a new loan on them. is compounded the problem because most had loans that were less than three years old and were all coming due at a time when lenders weren’t lending anymore, and property values were crashing as tenants vacated or quit paying. It was bad. Really bad. I asked my right-hand person and VP, Kelly Wiebke, if she could think of anything that was going right. She thought about it, jumped up, said “Stand by,” ran to the le room and pulled a le, slapped it down and said, “ is is going right!” In the file were the financials of a self-storage property we owned but had mostly forgotten. She was spot-on: is was going right. e property was gushing cash ow and was occupied with a wait list because of the recession. Prior to that, its cash owed every month we owned it, and it was never less than occupied. Barry Raber is a serial entrepreneur, president of Carefree RV Storage, a 22-year member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), the founder of Business Property Trust and a past winner of EO Portland’s Entrepreneur of the Year. He shares his successful business secrets at RealSimpleBusiness.org. LIVE WORK PLAY Pivot Toward What Is Going Right Mark’s idea planted a seed that grew into something beautiful. Kelly and I decided to try buying another storage property and see if it, too, would go right like the rst one —to make sure it was not a uke. e self-storage property we owned was in Denver; we ended up buying two more, one in Boise and one in Phoenix. ey performed just like the rst one right out of the gates. We also got good deals on these since no one was buying at that time. at was all we needed to see — we decided to go all-in on storage and sell all our business parks, e ectively pivoting the business from investing in one type of real estate to another, higher-performance type of real estate. We absolutely thrived in self-storage. We built up a new company and brand around it, ending up with properties in six states. While getting there was a lot of work, in the end, our revitalized company was far superior in every way to the former version. Financially, it was more pro table and, from a personal health and stress perspective, far less harrowing: Occupancy rates were much better, plus the income stream was more stable and diversi ed with over , tenants instead of business tenants. Running the company was more ful lling, too. Unlike the prior version, where property management was contracted to third parties, we actually managed the storage facilities ourselves. We enjoyed the opportunity to get creative with the brand, build a -person team and foster a solid company culture around it. In that company’s nal chapter, we chose to sell it when we were o ered a price we could not say no to. It was a notable nancial success, and since we had pivoted once with success, we decided to do it again. We are currently halfway into a three-year buildup of our third company, which specializes in covered RV and boat storage. Never Underestimate Serendipity Sometimes I marvel about kismet and serendipity: what an amazingly positive chain reaction Mark Moses set o with his “ nd what is going right” advice—and how lucky that we listened, found the needle in our haystack and expanded on it. e insight at the origin of this serendipitous process is something I try to instill and advocate for in others. Do me (and yourself!) a favor: Spend less time solving problems and more time nding what is going right and doing more of that. You will be glad you did. ⁄Storyteller-in-Chief⁄ Pivot to Something Better: The Power of Doing More of What’s Going Right BY BARRY RABER Barry Raber at Bargain Storage, one of his business’s properties PHOTOS COURTESY OF WOOD & SMITH 46
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