The key to riding a wave is reducing friction

It’s no different in business than it is in the water

You’ll know very quickly if you try to ride a wave which is more efficient — throwing your body into the wave, or riding a fiberglass board.

In business, you will experience waves of success and droughts you must trudge through. There’s no doubt — the frequency of each will be dependent on many different variables some out of your control, but how you handle each is very much within your control.

You can either jump on a board when you see a wave coming, or you can get caught off your board and thrash around as a maverick passes you by (or more aptly, throws you into a reef where you drown).

For us this happened and hasn’t truly stopped since late 2015 — out of nowhere our marketing caught up to us and we’ve had surges of clients and projects busting down the doors at the seams. It’s an amazing problem to have, too many clients to serve, and a lot of projects to maintain.

The funny thing is, by reducing friction in many areas, not only have we been able to close nearly 70–80% of those clients coming in, we have been able to keep them on far more efficiently than we did previously by reducing the friction in the client communication feedback loop, and we’ve been able to create a bandwidth surplus with the hours we already had, while having even more clients, just by upgrading current processes to be more efficient and take less time — while being no less effective.

If we had seen this wave coming in and jumped out of the way because we weren’t ready to handle it and make things happen — we would probably not be in business right now, or at least, we would be hurting.

That’s the ugly truth, but the beautiful truth is we saw it coming, we committed to making it work, we closed new clients left and right, we updated processes to reduce friction, and we came out better than we ever went in with a ton of new revenue to run on.

We took the bull by the horns and rode it until we tamed it. That’s what you need to do. If a competitor jumps out in front of you, don’t leap out of the way, find the best way to tackle the opposition and improve your processes.

Let iron sharpen iron, reduce your friction, and ride the waves that come at you — you’ll be happy you did when you look back from shore.