“Consistent behaviors create consistent results.” – Angela Brown Oberer
Consistency is the magic bullet to success.
The day was January 1st, the time was 7:00am and there were 22 people on the indoor track at the gym. Everybody bustling around and around in their new shoes and workout clothes they got for Christmas. The goal was to burn off the calories they ate for Christmas. Right on! Look at everybody go. New Year resolutions and consistency – here we come!
The next day there were 19 people on the track, and the following few days produced less numbers. 14, then 7, then 4 and today January 15th, only one solitary guy on the track at 7:00am on a Friday morning.
I wasn’t so curious about the other 21 people, like where did they go? Because as a long-time member of the gym, I see this every year. The gym is packed with people the first two weeks of January, locker rooms full of chit-chat and talk about losing weight and getting in shape for the spring. And then it goes dark. Don’t get me wrong, the lights in the gym are still on and the doors are unlocked for all of the people who never show up again, but it’s a ghost town.
Running on the track I wondered about the lone ranger over there who wasn’t wearing new Christmas shoes, or even gym clothes for that matter, just an ordinary guy in street clothes, walking his heart out on January 15th in an empty gym. What made him come back?
Why was he different from the others? Were his motivations any different from the others? Probably not. He was most likely at the gym for the same reasons we all go to the gym in the morning – to stay in shape, to get in shape, to clear the cobwebs from our brains and to get in the “zone”.
And it got me thinking about our house cleaning businesses. Most of us house cleaners start out with good intentions. We run flyers, we buy a fancy cleaning caddy and supplies, and just like flashing our jazzy new Christmas clothes at the gym, we hang out a shingle and we’re in business. One day we wake up with a headache and the cramps, and we call our clients to cancel our cleaning for the day – staying in bed feels SO GOOD.
Two weeks later after a grueling up-all-night with a sick kid, we wake up to the same “I feel like crap” sluggishness and we call in sick again. “It’s okay,” we tell ourselves, “I am the boss, my clients will work around me, and I get to choose my own work hours.” And for the most part, our clients do work around us. Yay.
And then we hit a January 15th in our business, our clients seem to disappear one by one. It’s never our fault, they lost their job, or they are going to be out of town and don’t need house cleaning this week, or a variety of other excuses that translate into “You are unreliable and we’ve found someone else we can count on.”
For all of the years I’ve been house cleaning, I can tell you this for a fact: There are days I didn’t want to be there. There were days the client didn’t want me to be there. But they were expecting me, and I showed up. Consistency is the magic bullet to success and I’ll share a little secret with you – You can run a killer business if you are consistent. But if you provide EXCELLENCE on a consistent basis – I promise you this, you will be the lone ranger on the business track on January 15th, because you will be in a league of your own.
“Consistency – it’s a habit you don’t want to break.” – Angela Brown Oberer
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