One book that is making a significant buzz of late is “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladstone. It is a good read, a blend of sociology and pop psychology mixed with anecdotes that tries to explain why some people achieve great success and why others don’t.
As always, I started to ponder how to relate this book to our industry and even just to myself. Many of us are witnessing significant changes and economic shifts within the auto glass field as well as the nation that not only affect business but ourselves as well.
One of Gladstone’s premises seems to be that luck plays a large role in helping certain persons attain eminence. In just taking the random act of being born, he cites examples of those born in certain eras or neighborhoods and even certain months of the year helped specific individuals more likely to make gains in certain fields or be failures in others.
To the owners out there: How many incidents of good luck took place that you were able to benefit from? I know of one young shop owner who was about a month away from having to close down when the owner of a major local dealership had a flat tire in front of his store. The glass shop owner helped the guy change the tire and the dealer went back to his business. Later that day, the dealership’s glass vendor botches a service job. The owner calls the Good Samaritan shop and invites him to fix it, which he does and is then given the account. From there, his shop goes on to earn the respect of several insurance and auto accounts based on the recommendations of the dealership and its owner. That incident took place more than 20 years ago and the business is still going strong.
What makes an auto glass business successful? The odds of any new business surviving more than two years are long. Just defining success can be hard since the odds of survival are against you in the first few years. One can elect to stay small. To stay open for 30 years, have the respect of the community it services along with bringing financial security to the owner and its employees has provide a certain measure of accomplishment.
Obviously those who can expand and open a chain of installation shops either regionally or nationally may redefine the term of “success.” However, in my almost four decades within the industry, I have seen kingdoms rise and fall as we did this year with Diamond. There have been manufacturers who bought up numbers of shops only to close them after a few years. I have seen franchises sold and then become worthless or acquired and reformed. Belron certainly did not have early success establishing a presence here in the United States. It is well known that they had some famous stops and starts over the past 20 years.
Call it luck when back in 1991 Garin Staglin took over as CEO of a pre-Belron Safelite. With his prior experience at ADP, he recognized the opportunity of assisting insurers with computerization and glass claims and the germination of Safelite Solutions became fact. While deplored by many independents, that segment of the business has grown substantially over the years.
Another area that “Outliers” addresses is that hard work oftentimes is far more important than native intelligence. He states that familiarity with your area of expertise by laboring at least 10,000 hours of practice to gain that mastery is far more important then a high IQ. Gladstone uses Mozart the musical child prodigy as an example whose early work paled in both sophistication and technical expertise with what he composed later in his teens. We all can make the claim that the 10,000th windshield was far less of an intellectual stretch and stress than the first one we ever had to do on our own. So being smart is certainly an asset, but the author maintains that practice, practice and more practice is a far more valuable tool for success than almost anything else.
One thing that interests me is future trends. What will the auto glass business be like in 10, 20 and even 50 years? Who will survive? Who will evolve? What sort of technology, materials and applications will be developed? Who won’t exist and why are questions that intrigue. This industry has not within my memory or experience ever remained static. History has taught us that empires rise and fall over time.
I strongly believe that there are people out there; some perhaps just being born that will shape this industry into a far different form than it is today. I just wonder if I’ll be “lucky” enough to appreciate the efforts. If not, I’ll just keep practicing reading my tea leaves.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!!
