Tune up

As everyone knows, I love old muscle cars and have owned many over the years. I have also bought new cars, trucks and SUVs.

I don’t care how much money you spend and how nice the vehicle is, if you don’t do a checkup and or a tune up periodically, you will find yourself on the side of the road. No vehicle is built to last with no follow up attention.

Houses, retirement accounts, family relationships, businessesthey all need a checkup and refocus from time to time.

What am I saying here? I am saying that we all know and understand everything I have just said is true, but when it comes to our lives, we think that the tune up we got 10 years ago is all we need to do. If we step away from this, we all know in our hearts that we need to do a regular checkup from the neck up.

In business, one must make changes in his/her approach and business model if you want to stay in business long term. There are so many corporate examples to choose from, but I will just choose one. BlackBerry. In the early 2000s up until 2007, Blackberry owned and controlled 90% of the global smart phone market. Today, a BlackBerry is like a pager.

The BlackBerry shareholders owned private jets and homes all over the world and thought their business model was perfect and that no one could usurp their market share. Obviously, they were wrong. When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, the BlackBerry folks said, it will never last, never be that big, and no one would leave the BlackBerry platform to switch to Apple. By the time Apple launched the iPhone 2, the momentum of BlackBerry changed and began a very long downward spiral.

Today, the shares of BlackBerry stock are trading at a fraction of what they were in 2005-2006. Why? BlackBerry forgot or ignored what its customers were saying and they lost one of the greatest markets of all time. Personally, I bought all the new BlackBerry phones as they came out was a diehard fan of the product. Then, someone showed me the iPhone, and I realized what you could do on an iPhone was 20x what you could do on a BlackBerry.

Whether we are looking at our business life, personal life or spiritual life we all need to take an assessment of where we are and where we want to go. I will promise you, if you are honest with yourself in all three areas, you know there are changes you need to make to stand through the test of time. You also know in your heart that if you keep doing things like you are doing them today, time and change will catch up with you and you will lose what you have.

A smart man once told me that what you compromise to keep, you will eventually lose. Think about that just a minute. If you compromise your health, your marriage, your business, etc., you are putting yourself at risk of losing it.

So, go talk to God about your spiritual life, kiss your spouse, and take a real inventory of the areas of your life that are important. Wash it, clean it, and tune it up so it will last. KT

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