11. The mental journey

11.

The mental journey

This part – the mental journey – is one of the most important segments in the whole process of adding digital value to your business, instead of only adding a new machine. It’s probably the most unknown factor that often stops us from executing our decisions.

You have to be prepared. If you don’t know and understand the steps and consequences of changing your business, nothing will happen. Not being prepared takes you far away from any decision. It will take you on a hard detour and it will feel tough as you might need to change and transform your business and company, but you never really get it done.

For most of you, reading this for the first time, transformations can be something new and unknown. If you don’t feel you’re in control, the upcoming effect (and result) won’t happen. You must understand all of the steps, good or bad, and be able to make the necessary changes. Otherwise, uncertainty will make you stop; uncertainty will make you look for easier and simpler alternatives. Your mental exit will emerge and you’ll hear yourself saying: “This is not for me, we don’t have this kind of jobs. Digital might be something for the future, but not now.” What happens to us if we embark on the mental journey? Well, imagine you are about to make a business decision. There are two roads ahead. One you already know, the same road you always drive. A road you know inside and out. The other road is new and unknown. One thing is similar for both roads. You’ll have to go through the entire math needed; prices, costs, finances, specifications, profitability, quality, speed, new applications, so on. When all the data looks

good, you reach a stage where you must make some kind of leap forward. It’s crunch time. Then, your defense mechanism reacts inside your stomach. Will you change? YES. Will you leave what you already know, change to something you never tried before? SCARY. Or will you stay on the same old road, that road you have been on for such a long time? EASY. Do you want to try a new road, where the market is moving, together with your customer? Yes or No?

The new road, for you a brand-new direction, adds a great deal of new added value for both your own business and most importantly for your own customers. Staying on the old road, using the same old tools (read conventional printing presses), will not take you forward. Maybe you’ll make a new investment to speed up your old tools. To shorten the time spent per job and creating a possibility of changing jobs faster than before. But will that add anything to your business value and improve your profitability? Probably not. You’ll soon have to give away every earned percentage to get the extra volume you need to reach the lower price tag per job. Will it add anything to your customer? No. You are back in the old treadmill, the usual rat race, where nothing new happened or got added in terms of new values to your products. The Graphic market is known for being a mature business, with low margins that continue decreasing. Do you feel scared or inspired? Right now, there’s a risk that Packaging Converters will take the same road as many Commercial Printers. It’s time to change to a new road! Switch to a new path where you add new digital values made for both you and (again, more importantly) your customer’s new demands and new needs. Focus on your own customer! It will make you unique in front of your customer and it’s why there is no “one-recipesolution”. Your customers are also unique to you and they are the ones that pay your bills, etc. Are you scared or still inspired? Your decisions are controlled by your stomach (gut-feeling), the math-questions (head) says YES or NO and the passion is in your heart. Passion is your driver, your engine to go forward or not. No engine, no move. But the real executer is your stomach. That requires some different kind of data. Not “what” but more of “how”, “if”, and “why”. Are we prepared? Do we have all the knowledge we need? How should we do it, how should we proceed? What if this or that happens? Welcome to the real journey, the mental journey. You can read more about the scary part, if you want to, on how and why we react as we do, in my previous book “Visions & transmissions” where there is a whole chapter dealing with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) thoroughly. This is central for all decisions and is located right in your stomach, usually called the gut feeling. After we’ve gone through this, hopefully you are now even

more inspired to execute your own change. That will lead you through this transformation and you’ll come out on the other end both stronger and more profitable. Now you will grow together with your customers. That relation, that togetherness, will get both of you ahead of your competition. I will say this now, and I will repeat it also later in the book. It will hurt down the road before it will get better again. There is no free lunch, I’m sorry. But the tree will bear fruit. The new road, the one less traveled yet, will take you there. I have been through this kind of changes many times before in my almost 40 years of working with transformations having transmissions as my engine in many different types of markets, all confirmed to have paid off very well.