Facing the problem always brings clarity to your life or your business. Before it gets worse, it helps to confront the issues head-on. In this short but powerful episode, Ken Courtright tells us to ram the torpedo before it is armed. He touches on the power of intervention and letting go of the negativity before it piles up and explodes. Learn about this torpedo metaphor and how you can apply it to your business and life.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Face the Torpedo
This is a short episode but very powerful. I was told by one of our consultants a phrase or a principle that I will never forget. I will never forget to stop teaching this one. It’s called Turn Towards the Torpedo. There’s a movie about a famous submarine in Russia that did this. If you know you’re being fired upon by a missile underwater, if it’s locked on you, the only move that you can make if you have the time is to turn towards the torpedo and ram the torpedo before it’s armed. Most of the time a torpedo doesn’t arm itself until it’s very close to target. There are reasons for that. If you can turn towards it and you can crash into it before it arms itself, it’s a chunk of metal and it acts like a bullet instead of a bomb. Is that apropos in business and in life? I’m going to start with life. Have you ever been faced with a time where you think there should be a family intervention?
If you face the torpedo before the bomb is armed, you could eliminate the explosion. Click To TweetMaybe somebody is spinning out of control. Maybe they drink. Maybe they do drugs. Maybe they’re talking negatively about themselves. Have you ever heard stories where people knew they needed to do a family intervention? They chose not to and the bomb went off. I think everybody knows what I’m talking about. Had the family has done the intervention, that’s called facing the torpedo before the bomb is armed, they could have possibly solved or eliminated that explosion. In business, there are a couple of points that I want to bring up. Sometimes, you might need to let an employee go. You kind of know that you know, but you’re not 100% sure. I was taught by Cameron Herold, the author of Double Double that if you think you have to let an employee go, take their salary, multiply it by four. That is probably what they’ve cost you and what they’re about to cost you moving forward.
If you think they need to be let go, they’re probably not in the game, and worse, the negative seeds they’re planting with other people, you cannot even add the cost of that up. You need to face the torpedo, intervene immediately before that torpedo is armed. I want to get into budgets. How many times as a business owner entrepreneur, you got this crazy idea for a product and it’ll go. You know in your heart or you want to hire 35 people, but it’s going to cost X or whatever. You need funding. I have seen so many people that try to grind it out because they want to stay debt-free. I’ve done this my whole life so I can sell you the other side as easily. Not everybody is as disciplined as you need to be if you’re going to be self-funded. Wouldn’t it be easier to sell someone on loaning you money, especially if you have the collateral, a line of credit at a bank? Get the funding you need at a small interest rate short-term, nothing drastic and then attempt it.
I’ve gone in my lifetime, two to three years, trying to battle marketing, advertising budgets, really small budgets. I learned later if I would have put bigger money on bigger platforms, we could have been done in 5% the time, a twentieth of the time. The things in my life that resonate with this principle are family interventions. I got to do a better job of facing the torpedo. By letting people go, we got to do a much better job facing the torpedo because that’s inevitable. Not everybody’s going to be in what’s called phase five, The Clarity Phase. Finally, when it comes to needing money and budgets, which again every two to three years, if you’re S-curving, if you’re adding new modules and models to your company, you always need new funding. Face the torpedo and get the funding sooner, it will take all the pressure off.
Important Links:
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Leave a Reply