First, let’s celebrate the end of a great season, Happy Memorial day weekend! I got out for a total of 7 hunting days last year, All trips to the Ring Neck Ranch in Seward, NE. The ranch is my family private property of 328 acres of CRP just outside of Seward, NE. All the birds are wild and its by invite only. I had my best friends out multiple times and my son for a few days. Like my dad and I did growing up.
If you’re like me you look forward to work each day and hunting season each year. Now that I have 5 months before pheasant season opens again, I have a lot to think about. Looking at my business and my hunting there are a lot of similarities. You have to prepare for both, prior to the season starting. Make sure your sales team or dogs are in shape, updated on the goal and well fed with features & benefits. Your equipment and technology must function correctly at all times to ensure success and a good customer experience. A lot of training and practice goes into a successful campaign.
In business, we have to look at our market, verticals and industries and budgets. With hunting we have to look at the fields, crops grown and weather as well as costs. (such as hotels, meals, transportation).
Unlike business, hunting can never have a bad ROI (return on investment), even the worst day hunting is still a great day. I am with my boys and my dogs in the outdoors. I just finished the book “Leadership and Self Deception”, I loved the book especially since it relates to life and business. From boosting the bottom line to increasing personal joy, this book covers them all. Remember as a leader we sometimes fall into that trap of self-deception, in my current role, the executive team has been together a long time and sometimes all we see is how good we are or think we are. It isn’t until one of us comes back from a conference or a client meeting to find out we need to look at a few new ideas or directions.
In work, if we keep doing what we’ve always done will keep getting the same results, if those results are good then keep going. What I’ve learned is that I am not always right and if I think I am always right, I am usually wrong. There are many different ways to look at a problem or opportunity, so gather feedback from the hive mind and research the market and your competitors to see what their doing. I call it the gas station theory, If I were to build a new gas station in town, regardless of what my costs are, I have to remember that the going rate for a price of gas is $3.00/gallon (made that up, but close). So even if my costs are higher to build and the performance results show I should be charging $4.00/gallon to cover costs and make a profit, I will lose since no one would buy gas from me. Hunting is different since we are dealing with birds that have the same internal instincts to survive, (water, food, coverage, reproduce, repeat). So each year on opening day, depending on the weather I can walk the same draw, CRP field as I have for the last 40 years. However, some years I have gotten dozens of birds and other years none, out of that same field. It’s all about timing. My buddies always ask me, “John, where do we hunt next?”, I say the landscape is the same every year and there is little rhyme or reason as to why one field, one year is better than the next, I have gotten birds out of everywhere and even places I said, “there is no way they are there?”.