Spiral Up = A steady progression upward in a circular motion. In business, you want to continually “Spiral Up”. #000113

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Spiral Up

By Gary Shotton

Hello, I am Gary Shotton and today we are going to talk about the “Spiral up!” What do I mean by that? You know if you have ever watched something, an event, or people, or life in general; you will see they are either growing or gaining traction, they are gaining position, they are gaining wealth, they are gaining status, so their life is spiraling in a very positive direction. There is not a jump up, it is a spiral, it is around kind of around again the next year just slightly higher. I have been able to watch and talk to some people that had extra initiative or extra funding and man they could spiral up fast. But they are continuing to spiral up in their lives and in their personal finances. Then there’s other people I am around and I when I am around them very long at all, I start seeing that they are on a spiral down. There their life is not totally out of control but if they are not careful their life is in a direction that every year since a little worse than the previous year. Their cars are a little older they are breaking down a little bit easier. They are breaking down more often. They are washing machine breaks when they did not expect it. They are out on the limb. They do not have what we would call “margin” in their life you know if you have a printed paper on any kind of a white sheet of paper. If you can change what is called the margins on both sides of the paper. If you have too little of margin you know that does not print right. Well, that is true with our lives. How much margin do we have in our life, so that we can handle the bumps that come to all of us? Some people are spiraling down, and a bump hits them hard and now they are in a catastrophic situation. They are spiraling out of control. It is said that a high percentage of Americans, anyway I know this is for people all around the world. The rest of the world looks at America thinks we are all rich and everything is going well. But we are financed, in other words we owe a lot of money as a nation and as a people group. So, something can happen in a person’s life like a major health issue, or a loss of job, or something significant like that, and their spiraled down just accelerates. It is said that many people are just one paycheck away from living on this street. I have had friends; I have acquaintances that lost their house they had no place to sleep. And in one case it was a very awkward but the person the single parent had the family living in the van and they went into the local stores to use the bathroom and slept in the van for several months. That is a spiral down. Well, let us talk about business.

You in your business, you should be able to look back from just a slow small distance back, not too far back, look as from an overview and ask yourself, “am I spiraling up or am I spiraling down. Up means I can pay my bills just a little bit faster than that week before or the month before. I can take a little bit of money out and put it in my reserve, my margin, my savings account for my company that is different than your personal. I can have some equipment that I could buy cash rather than borrow that it for that equipment. That is a company that is spiraling up. We are wanting to be that kind of a company. Now, obviously the others crew that when someone has a company spiraling down, they do not have the money. I have a situation with a company that we work a little bit with it, so it is a peripheral company up in our similar business and they have called me several times because they needed paid early. They did work for us; they have no money to buy materials for their next job. They have no money to fix their equipment. It is a company that is spiraling down and what do I want to do? I kind of stay away from that company. I cannot stay I cannot depend on them. They are nice people, but I cannot rest because I do not know when it is going to spiral out of control to the end. Well, I want our company, Auto-Turn Manufacturing, I’m sitting here in my company, and I know that we have seasons of cycles (that’s another subject) but I know that we are spiraling up. We are spiraling up. I just faced a situation of about 15 to 18 months of a low economy, low business volume, down about 40% from our normal sales, and we were not spiraling down, we were not going up much, but we were spiraling up, slowly. But as we came to the end of that cycle, we can really gain traction, to gain business, so we are on a heavy ramp up right now and we are spiraling up quickly. What did I do? Even before I had a full vision, I took the face step and gave major reviews, major pay increases, for virtually everyone in our company, 50 people. It had been a while since they had received a raise and so I purpose to not just give them a small little bitty incremental increase. I wanted to give them a significant enough increase, that they had what I would call a good factor. That is good. I asked for them in getting that raise, that I need their help. Because what pays for that raise is for them is to be more efficient. We are providing the systems and policies and procedures for them to step in and help us be more efficient. I am you were spiraling up. We are spiraling up as a company. With our employees were paying more than we did before by quite a bit. there was a little lag for two to three years. Some of them not had a raise and we made that jump and they are on board and they are now very interested. They were good before, we had a good team, but they are really looking for us in how to save money, by reducing expenses or coming up with ideas. And I have already told them that the raises that I gave them in the last two or three months is not the last one. I am of a mind that if we can continue to spiral up, we will be in more and more demand, higher and higher quality, better and better employees, more revenue to pay raises, again. I intend to spiral up another notch or two until my personal goal is to pay every single position in our company at 20% higher than the norm in our region. I do not compare with somebody else hundreds of miles from here because we have a particularly economy. But if you want to go to work for Auto-Turn, my company, you are going to go at a high return for your services to our company. And you are going to be expected to produce and a higher-than-normal rate without being beat over the head and criticized to get there. So, I encourage you as a business to look at your business and ask, “Am I spiraling up, or am I spiraling down?” If I am spiraling down, what needs do I do to stop the free-fall? How do I get past that? Normally, it is to trim back on what you are doing, not grow. You cannot grow into more efficiency. But if you are spiraling upkeep that spiral going. Keep it going up. And I tell you what, you are going to have a company, not only that is profitable, if you ever want to sell it, you are going to have a wonderfully good opportunity to sell your business. Thanks for listening. I hope you will tune in to IBBTalks.com. I hope you will spread the word, that we are here to “Inspire Better Business”. Thank you very much!!!