#23 Your Greatest Results Will Come From Great Change.

Think about it. When’s the last time you were sitting around on your couch, maybe binge watching some streaming show that you’ve already seen before? I hate to say it, I’ve done that more than once this last year or two. But when’s the last time you’ve done that and great changes happened?

Welcome to the Easy SEO and more podcast. I’m Dr. Ty, an SEO expert and CEO of Portbell.com.

I’ve been doing online marketing for over 20 years, and I’ve learned a lot about change in that time.

Other than maybe getting a little bit bigger around the middle, changes rarely happen when nothing’s going on.

However, great results happen when great change does happen. I have a client, Pioneer Farm Museum, and we’ve been working with them for several years, whenever they have your changes to dates and things like that. But up until recently, they hadn’t updated their website in many years; it wasn’t even mobile friendly.

And so we decided to go ahead and get them into the modern age, get them a mobile friendly website. And when the new website was up and running  live, 

it immediately dropped in the search engines by hundreds of points. And they lost almost every keyword… for a while.

And then they started rising up higher than they ever were before. Not just because their website was mobile friendly, but many factors. Google has over 200 factors that they use when they rank a website, the most important of which is content. This website always had great content. So, it wasn’t the content that did it.

But it was mobile friendly and it was a lot faster. It was a lot more modern. And, since it was more modern, people were going to it even more to see what’s going on at Pioneer Farm Museum, especially with everything that has been going on with COVID. People wanted to find out when they were open, what parts were open, how they were doing everything.

But so great results will come from great change. Another example, I used to drink coffee all the time. And for some reason coffee doesn’t agree with me anymore. So I switched to iced tea. And I love iced tea. But the quickest way I know to make iced tea is to take your tea bags and heat them up, and then let them cool down again, and then make iced tea out of it.

It takes longer just to put the tea bags in and put the bottle in the window sill so the sun will warm it up. So, I put it onto the stove and it’s a lot faster. But it also is very hot when it first gets done. And, of course, the quickest way to cool tea is to put ice in it.

But if I put the ice cubes in and just let them sit there, it’ll still take a long time for the tea to cool down. However, if I stir the ice cubes into the tea, it cools down a lot quicker. Great change, I’m stirring it. And in the middle of stirring it, I might change the direction of the stirring. And that will create even more change, which creates even better results, making it cool down even faster. You can tell because the ice cubes melt even faster so the water’s getting colder faster.

So, think about what you can do to create great change. Now change isn’t always a good thing. But good things can come out of change even when the change itself isn’t great. And change happens. A a very common saying is that we don’t like change, but it’s not really true: We just don’t like the changes that we don’t like. I’ve never known anybody be upset because they won the lottery. But that’s a great change.

And so it’s better to look at change as being an opportunity, especially if you’re a leader. Leaders need to be change-agents. I Talk about this in my book Leadership for Introverts.

Leaders need to be change agents. Every business owner should be a leader. And everyone, even if you’re a solopreneur, you’re still a leader because you’re still working with other people in one way or another. And you need to be a change-agent.

So you need to not only accept change, but embrace it, because change is what’s going to make your business go higher. The bigger a business gets, the slower they change things generally, which is why smaller companies can outperform them because they can change faster. Especially in the technology world. Things changed drastically with COVID-19 in March of 2020.

What was one of the biggest changes that happened? Well, Zoom became a huge company almost overnight. Think about it. They weren’t that big before. People resisted working from home. Managers thought that they couldn’t manage employees that were working from home. Then, all of a sudden, huge change.

That’s what’s came out of that change, businesses have realized that it costs them less for their people to work from home, and they get great productivity out of it. They thought they were getting more for a while, but it turned out that the productivity has been about the same. But it hasn’t gone down in general. Of course, there’s always scenarios where people are taking advantage of something or where they’re working even harder, and the company is taking advantage; that happens. But in general, productivity is still the same.

But it works better for the employees because they’re not spending all the time commuting, which means it helps the environment. It helps the company because they don’t need as large of an office space as they used to need.

So this COVID change is actually, in the long run, to me been a great benefit for many, many businesses. Even businesses thatit hurt at first. We worked with some local restaurants, I mean, just hardcore when when the COVID lockdowns first started, because it just hit them so hard. So many of them shut their doors forever.

And we wanted to help it in any way we could. So, we worked with these restaurants and get them online. The ones that got online, even though COVID is relaxing, they still do more takeout than they do dine in, even now. And their takeout businesses is just skyrocketing. Even now, when people are getting out more, people want to do take out and go to a park bench or something. They are getting used to not sitting down in the restaurant. And when the restaurants full, now they can say, hey, do takeout instead if you want to, and they can serve even more clients at the same time. So they’ve learned to actually raise their revenue a great amount.

And that’s all come from great change. So don’t look at change as a bad thing. great results will come from great change.

This is Dr. Ty. Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you next week.