View Limitations as Opportunities

Coach's Corner: View Limitations as Opportunities

By Tim Reed, President, WhyFire

What would you do in your business if you had a limitless budget? What if you had an infinite amount of time? Or an inexhaustible number of employees?

Probably nothing of substance. Because limitless potential is simply that—potential. And actualizing potential into something tangible and concrete requires acknowledging and submitting to limitations and constraints.

This isn’t fashionable in our world today. Our pop-culture influencers tell us that limits are the enemy of pleasure, while our business gurus implore us to throw off all constraints to pursue scale and growth. They tell us that all we need to do is learn this hack, and we too can get around the natural limits of time, sleep, and anything else that stands in our way.

While this is one way to view the world, I would argue that it sets us down a path of futility. Rather than viewing the natural constraints of our lives—and the world at large—as curses, we can choose to see them as gifts because of the opportunities they present.

Why was it that Walmart grew so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without any major competition? Because they only opened Walmart stores in cities with a population of 2,000 to 20,000 people. That self-imposed constraint kept them under the radar of national competitors for decades and exposed an incredible opportunity to do business in small-town America that everyone else was missing. While many people wish they weren’t limited by their need for sleep, their family demands, or their financial situation, the truth is that there are incredible opportunities that only exist because of those constraints.

For years, I didn’t believe this. I thought if I could only get past the limitations in my life, then I’d be able to find and take advantage of opportunities.

But opportunity isn’t realized in a lack of limitations; opportunity is found in the limitations themselves.

When a company shifts from using limitations as excuses to viewing them as opportunities, something powerful happens.

They gain an immediate market advantage for product development, innovation, and efficiency while most other companies are content to navel-gaze and maintain the status quo.

Natural Limitations Lead to Innovation and Unrivaled Creativity

Why is it that so many of the greatest artists do their best work before they achieve commercial success? Because the constraint of being poor and desperate is often more effective than excessive wealth and comfort. When I started my software company, we had a certain amount of seed money—and that was it. Banks and loans were not an option. This meant that we had to think hard about how we spent money and not jump at every potential idea. Creative solutions abounded because we simply had no other choice. Necessity is often the mother of invention, and in those formative years, we innovated like crazy because there was no alternative.

In one of our early meetings, we showed our software to a large company. After walking them through one of the projects we’d just completed, the president commented that the company had recently spent over $1.5 million on a similar initiative with lackluster results. I was shocked—both by the amount the company had spent without a tangible return and the fact that the cost of our project was $300, lots of coffee, and a few months of late nights from a dedicated team.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a large budget. But in our case, the innovation on the project would have never come without our intense financial limitations.

And it’s not only financial constraints that lead to creativity and innovation. Think about the limitation of where your business is located.

About 11 years ago, I was given my first “management” position in a retail showroom. The problem was that I was the only employee who worked there (so there was no one to manage except myself), the “showroom” was basically an empty warehouse with some wood stoves on the floor, the building was in a sketchy industrial parking lot that looked like a meth lab, and there were train tracks so close to the building that every time a train passed (which was three to four times per day), the showroom was filled with a deafening noise that lasted about 90 seconds and the floor literally shook. Needless to say, it wasn’t the most inviting place for consumers to come and buy high-end appliances.

That location was a serious limitation—but it was also an incredible opportunity. During that time, I was forced to think about my sales process and my follow-up process in a way I never would have if I’d had a perfect showroom with consistent foot traffic. It led me to track our weekly door swings and the percentage of customers who received estimates and scheduled in-home appointments before they left. And most importantly, as we gained traction and hired a sales team, it showed us that we had to build our entire business around going out to customers— rather than waiting for them to come in and visit us.

We can all think of natural limitations that have led us to opportunities. Maybe it was the opportunity for a new job because there was no path for growth at the current one. Maybe it was creating an installation checklist because there wasn’t enough time to be at every job. Or maybe it was automating inefficient processes because there wasn’t the budget to hire another team member. For me, outside limitations—whether lack of time, money, location, or control—have helped me see opportunities that I would have been blind to otherwise.

If we truly learn to view natural limitations as opportunities, the creativity and innovation that emerge will be incredible.

Chosen Limitations Lead to Focus and Intentionality

Not only do we need to view natural limitations as opportunities, but enduring companies of significance choose to bind themselves with constraints to protect them from themselves.

Just like Sam Walton limiting his expansion to small rural towns in the 1960s, or Bill Hewlett, around the same time, insisting that the 9100A series calculator had to fit within the space of a typewriter, the greatest minds on earth know that freedom comes from within the bounds of limitation.

Think about it. What gives a basketball player the freedom to create? The constraint of the lines on the court, the height of the hoop, and the rules of the game itself. Without these, there’s literally nothing.

The very act of a business choosing limitations to abide by necessitates intentionality—and that level of focus can steer them around many of the traps that companies in the unregulated pursuit of more fall into.

There was a time in my last job when I was really frustrated with our installation team because it took them forever to run gas line. I was convinced that they were taking hours longer than they should have, and the result was that our schedule in the already busy season was getting pushed out further and further. One day, I was venting to our installation manager about it, and he said, “Fine. This time of year, we won’t run any gas line that’s longer than 15 feet.” I was furious. One of the ways that our sales team won jobs was by taking on gas line. But, as we went ahead with this rule in place, our installs started going faster, and our capacity to install more completely changed. Not only that, but we found that there were a ton of jobs with under 15 feet of gas line, and by exclusively focusing on those, we sold more than ever.

In hindsight, I was completely wrong, and my installation manager was completely right. Given the limitations of our installation team—whether right or wrong—choosing the constraint of selling jobs with less gas line provided an incredible opportunity for installation efficiency and higher profit. By choosing to limit ourselves to certain kinds of work, we clear the way for what’s best for us and our customers.

In my company today, there are two constraints we’ve placed upon ourselves to give us a level of control and intentionality. The first is that we cashflow everything and don’t operate with debt. Even though we could take out a line of credit, we choose not to. This means that we grow slowly and that innovations must drive revenue. It’s forced us to be ruthless in evaluating the effectiveness of our products because we don’t have the luxury of going out to get more money.

Another constraint we’ve chosen is to limit the number of programmers on our team, which significantly limits our ability to develop every new idea we have. Instead, it forces us to choose the best idea to work on because their time is so valuable. There’s real pain there since the speed of our product development is capped, but it’s well worth it— because without this constraint, we’d run ourselves off the rails chasing every half-baked idea that floats into our heads. In addition, it has capped our cost structure and pushed us to find automations and efficiencies that we never would have bothered with if we could have just hired another programmer.

Companies that go after everything achieve nothing. But companies that choose to limit themselves achieve laserlike focus and intentionality. The journey of business is always bumpy, but self-imposed limitations put you in as much control as possible to ensure you arrive where you want to go.

The siren song of our culture is to throw off all constraints, and this draws many into the vortex of futility. But people who lead lives—and companies—of significance are those with the humility to live within limitations and the faith to stand firm until they find the opportunities therein. ■