Salena Knight (00:03.278) Everybody has a superpower. Mine is this. I can usually tell within minutes of talking to a business owner where their business is at, where it could be, and what is standing in between those two things. Now, I don't say that to sound impressive. I say it because it is the thing that has shaped everything about how I work. And honestly, it's a thing that drives me a little bit crazy because I can see the potential so clearly. I can see the version of the business that is possible. And I'm sitting there watching the owner talk themselves out of it in real time, giving me all the excuses of why it's not possible. You know what I hear the most from people I work with? You believe me. Salena Knight (00:50.156) You know what I hear the most? Salena Knight (00:54.402) You know what I hear the most often from people who I work with? Sal, you believe in me more than I believe in myself. Now I've had heard that more times than I can count. And every single time I say, it's not that I believe in you more, it's that I can see what you can't see right now. And what you can't see is the version of your business that exists on the other side of the choices that you keep not making. That is what this episode is about. Playing it safe, why we do it, why it costs us, and why, until you understand what is actually driving it, you will keep doing it without even realizing that you are. Which means you're gonna stay in the same place. Hey there, I'm Salena Knight, and welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, where we talk all about ways to make more money and grow your retail or e-commerce business. So I love to start with a story. And usually they're mine. So this story is, and you will have heard this if you've listened to the podcast before. At the time, you don't realize that this is a thing. It's not until afterwards that you realize something is a pivotal moment. We never know in the moment that this is going to be something that changes our entire lives. So for me, it looked a little something like this. It was a Saturday like any other Saturday. I got into the store. I used to get about eight o'clock in the morning. We didn't open till 10, but I got there because I just wanted to get all these things done, and it was way easier to do that if there was nobody else in the shop, if there were no no team members and no customers. This day was different. I still can't tell you what was different about that day. It was just the simple fact that I turned up, I put the key in the lock, I turned the I turned it, I opened the door, and I looked around the room and just realized that. If I sold everything in the store, I would have around $30,000. Actually, I didn't know that in the moment. I actually went to my POS to see how much stock I had. I did some quick a dirty math and realized that if I sold everything, it would be about $30,000. Now the reality is there's you don't sell everything in a day. You it'd be terrible if you sold everything in a day. But it was that moment where I realized once I took out Salena Knight (03:18.764) The the cost of goods, the utilities, the overheads, wages. The reality is there was barely anything left. What I realized in that moment, and that moment was literally walking into the stock room, sitting in the corner and bawling my eyes out. And just realizing that if things didn't change, nothing changes. This is where my saying goes. You hear me. If you if you know me, I always say, if nothing changes, nothing changes. This came that came from this, from in that corner crying, realizing that. I couldn't continue to show up and do what I was doing and expect a different result because what I was doing wasn't working. What I knew at the time was that my problem wasn't customers. Salena Knight (04:19.746) What I knew in that moment was my problem wasn't sales. My store sat at a 90% conversion rate. Sounds awesome, but what does it tell you? People were only coming to my store to buy. The real problem was cash. I wasn't doing any paid marketing. I wasn't really doing any marketing at all apart from on well back then Facebook, because I didn't have the money to do it. But I also couldn't afford not to do it. I was overwhelmed. Because I was trying to do way too many things. At this point in time, I had two casuals who only worked a few hours a week. So I was trying to do all of the things. What I realized in that moment that the key issue was actually cash. The reality was if I sold everything in the store, the amount that I would have left over was not going to grow the business. It was going to be like $6,000. That was not growing the business. The business needed a growth plan, which really just needed a cash injection. But I realized if I kept playing it safe, the business that I wanted was never going to exist. It wasn't going to do it on $6,000. When you do the math, it simply was not possible. So in that moment, I made a decision. And that decision was to sell. My security. I grew up poor. I never wanted to be in a position where I could ever go back to not having enough money to eat. Over the years, I'd worked two, sometimes three jobs, and I had built up enough money to buy an investment property. For me, that was my lifeline. That was if this all goes pear-shaped, I still have that thing. And it will get me out. I still can't believe to this day that I was brave enough to make a decision to sell that property. Remember, this was my lifeline. But I called up my husband and I told him I was selling the property. Salena Knight (06:30.656) I knew that I was playing it safe. The math didn't lie. Safe wasn't neutral. Safe wasn't being responsible. Safe was a choice that had a cost attached to it. And up until that point, I had not been adding that cost up. I had literally been playing shop. That is what I want you to talk about today. Because I see this in businesses everywhere. In pretty much every business that I work with. Every level, and I'm going to show you exactly where it is showing up in yours. But before we get there, I want to talk about why we do it. I don't know about you, but I like to know the why. This is not a you problem, this is a human problem. Your brain is trying to protect you. So let me give you an example. I always love examples too. It's much easier if someone just gives me like something that I This is where accounting, I wish someone would have just told me it was just money. So I'm gonna give you, I will always put examples in. If someone offered you, let's toss a coin, heads you win a hundred dollars, tails, you have to pay me a hundred dollars. Most people will not take that bet. Even though mathematically you have an even chance of both. But the potential loss feels worse than the potential gain feels. There's a concept in psychology called loss aversion. And these two researchers who I will not attempt to name because I will butcher their names, but what they found out was this: the pain of losing something is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining the same thing. Huh. A little bit of FOMO here. Now, what I think happens when you're sitting down to write down the goals for your business. Salena Knight (08:28.688) That was wrong. Yeah. Now, let's bring this back to you. Think about what happens when you're sitting down to write the goals for your business. I like to do a good, better, best. And then a little stretch. So your brain is doing that same calculation. It says, okay, if I aim for that and I hit it, great. But if I aim for that and I don't hit it, that is gonna hurt. That is gonna make me feel like a failure. That's gonna make me feel like I got it all wrong. That's gonna make me feel why do I bother? So your brain, which is wired to avoid that pain at almost any cost, it pulls you back. It pulls you back to a number or a goal that feels achievable. It feels safe. A number that you can already see a path to. A number that doesn't require you to change too much about the way you're operating right now. You're going to call that being realistic. But here's what's actually happening: you are not being realistic. You are letting your brain make that decision for you from that place of loss aversion. Your brain is not optimizing for the business that you want. It is optimizing for keeping you safe. That is it. That is the whole thing. And until you understand that, until you can look at those conservative choices that you keep making and you can name it for what it is. Nothing changes. Because it doesn't feel like a conservative choice. It feels like it is good judgment. It feels like being careful. It feels like being responsible. It feels achievable. Safe is very good at disguising itself as sensible or logical or the voice of reason. There is a book you've probably heard about me talking about before. You probably heard me talk about before. 10x is easier than 2x. By Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I was introduced to this book two or three years ago now. And honestly, it revolutionized how I think about my everyday tasks and how I think about where my business is going. Here's the core premise of the book. Most business owners aim for 2x, double, double the revenue, double the customers, double the output. And because it sounds achievable, because you can pretty much see how to get there. Salena Knight (10:49.922) You try to do it by doing more of what you're already doing. You just put more hours in, more effort, more money, more of the same, just harder and maybe faster. But here's what Sullivan and Hardy found. The effort required to get to 2x and the effort required to get to 10x, roughly the same. Huh. Same effort. But 2x just keeps you doing more of what you're already doing. Which means you're still carrying all the things that built the business that you currently have. You're just doing them more. The business that you currently have has a ceiling. More of the same hits that ceiling pretty fast. 10x is different. You can't get to 10x by doing more of what you're doing now. It doesn't work like that. So instead of adding more products, more hours, more tasks, more efforts, you have to subtract. You have to identify that small percentage of what it is you're doing that is actually moving the business forward and let go of the rest. Those are going to be the comfortable things, the familiar things, the things that your brain has categorized as safe because they have always been part of how you operate. That is where it gets hard. Because letting go of the 80% that is keeping you where you are does not feel like progress in the moment. It feels like risk. It feels like you are giving up on the things that work. Your brain flags this as dangerous. But that 80% is the ceiling. Until you are willing to release it, the ceiling is going to stay exactly the same as where it is. Now I'm not telling you to go and write your 10x goal on the sheet today. That that's not the point of this episode. The point is this. The goal that you write down shapes every decision that follows it. And if that goal is safe, if that is a number that you can already see your path to from where you are standing right now, every decision you're going to make is going to be made from that safe space as well. That loss aversion brain setting. And safe decisions stacked on top of each other. Build a business that looks exactly like the one you have right now. So let's talk about where this shows up. What I've talked about sounds like a lot of theory. Salena Knight (13:13.698) And you might be thinking, well, apart from say a revenue goal, how else am I playing it safe? Safe is everywhere in your business, but most of the time it wears a disguise. The first one is obvious, your goals. I had a conversation with a store owner recently, a very smart lady, works extremely hard. The business is doing really well, but sells superpower. It is doing nowhere near what it is capable of. Here is the kicker. She had previously told me what her goal was. But when I asked her, I think it was a week or so later, to write that down so that we could start reverse engineering the plan to get there, the answer that she gave me on the sheet of paper was not the same. It had dropped dramatically. Why? Because she was setting her goal from inside the current version of the business. She was looking at what she had right now, the team, the technology, the cash flow, and working from there and landing on a number that felt maybe like a bit of a stretch, but it was not going to be impossible. And here is the problem with that. The current version of the business is the thing that needs to change. You cannot plan your way to a bigger business using the same thinking that built you the small one. The goal has to come from the destination. From what you want the business to be, and then we reverse engineer back to where you are now. But when your brain is running in that loss aversion mindset in the background, you do it the other way. You start from where you are and you take a little step forward and you call it a goal, you call it a win. It's something we can cross off. It's exactly like when you have a to-do list and you add things on just so you can cross them off. It's not a goal, it's just an extension of your current situation, dressed up as ambition. The second place that you might find safe shows up, and this was a little bit uncomfortable. Every time I say this, I get so much pushback. I get lots of people who literally flinch. But it's pricing. How long have your prices been where they are? For a lot of store owners, the answer is longer than they should have been. And when I ask why they haven't put their prices up, I hear some version of the same thing. My customers will push back, I'll lose sales. Salena Knight (15:40.782) It's not the right time. The economy is tough right now. I want to be nice to my customers. I want them to stay. All of that might be true. But here is the other thing that is true. If your margins are tight and you are not pricing for where the business needs to be, you are funding a business that structurally cannot grow. The math doesn't work. It just feels safer than the conversation that you need to have with yourself about what your pricing is saying about your business. Because putting your pricing up isn't just a revenue decision. It affects your positioning. It is a statement for about what your products are worth and who they're for. And your brain does not want to make that statement. Because if you make it and your customers disagree, it is going to hurt. So instead, you absorb those increases and you call it keeping your customers. But it is safe. It is safe disguised as a strategy. But it is slowly reducing. Your profitability. Which leads me perfectly to the third place. Difficult conversations. Not pricing conversations, but difficult conversations. So let's say you have a team member who isn't performing, you know it, they probably know it, and you haven't said anything yet. Or you have a supplier whose terms don't work for you anymore. The relationship is fine. They're nice people. You don't want to rock the boat. Or you work with an agency. Someone who is running your ads or your social media, but you're saying no return. But they're nice. And if I get rid of them, we're gonna have to find somebody else, gonna have to like train them again, like it's gonna be expensive. It's expensive, it's uncertain, it feels disruptive. Every one of those conversations that you haven't had is a decision. And it's a decision you have made, even if it doesn't feel like a decision. You chose The friction of the conversation that you need to have over the ongoing cost of the problem that you're living with. And that ongoing cost is always higher. Always. Because the problem doesn't fix itself while you're waiting for the right moment to address it. It just keeps costing you in time, in money, in momentum, in energy, in team culture, sometimes all of those things at once. The team member who's underperforming. Salena Knight (18:06.464) Is demoralizing everybody around them. The supplier terms that don't work are draining your profit every single order. The agency that isn't delivering is burning through your budget every single month. But the conversation feels risky, feels uncomfortable, and the status quo feels safe. And so you stay. And those costs keep adding up. There's one final place I want to talk about. These are like my top four. And I'm bringing this to your to your attention from conversations I've had recently. Because right now, what I know is we want more money. We know that our margins are are lower. We know with the world around us that pricing is going to go up, customers are becoming a little bit fickle. We don't what I'm seeing is you don't want to make those hard decisions. You don't want to have the hard conversations. You don't want to Operate from the not so safe place. So here's one final place that safe might be hiding, and that is in your stock decisions. And it is sneaky because it genuinely sounds like very good financial management. It could be ordering conservatively, it could be not overcommitting on inventory, being careful with your cash. And yes, you know me, cash flow matters. I'm not going to tell you to throw caution to the wind. And overorder everything. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this: if you are chronically underordering your best sellers because it feels responsible, you are playing it safe straight to the tune of lost revenue. Your customers who wanted that product and couldn't get it, they don't wait. They don't call you and ask when it will be back in stock. They just go get it from somebody else. And depending on the experience that she has there, she may never come back. You make the safe choice on a stock order, and it may cost you a customer. It's not careful, it's just really expensive. So let me bring this all back to where I started. In that storeroom, the moment of doing the math. What I realized that day wasn't just about the stock I was holding or the cash that I was sitting on. It was about every decision that I had made from inside this constraint. Salena Knight (20:33.824) Of feeling safe. Those prices that I hadn't put up, the conversations I'd been avoiding, the investments that I kept telling myself I would make when the time was right. When was that time? I didn't write that down. Safe had a cost, and I had been playing with it without adding up what that cost was. The moment I stopped letting safe be the ceiling, the moment I made the decision to do the thing that for me felt the most. genuinely risky in my life selling that security, that investment property, that required me to back myself. Salena Knight (21:20.748) And back myself in a very real and very uncomfortable way. But everything started to change. And here's what I want you to hear in that it didn't change because I suddenly had more money, or I became braver or more confident or more motivated. It changed because I finally understood what safe was costing me. You can have all the motivation in the world, but if you don't understand that your brain is constantly running a protection program in the background. Choosing the familiar, the proven, the path of least resistance, it will keep you making those safe choices and wondering why your business isn't moving. Awareness is the thing. When you can see the pattern, we can interrupt it. So here's what I want you to do with this: pick one place in your business where you feel like you might be playing safe. Just one. Maybe it's the goal that you wrote down that you know in your gut. You've written down because you know that you can achieve it. Maybe it's those prices that you haven't put up or that conversation that you need to need to have. Maybe it's that stock order that you keep pulling back on. Find it, name it, and then ask yourself one question. What is this actually costing me? Specifically, what is the ongoing cost in dollars, in time, in energy of keeping things exactly where they are? Because that's the number that safe never shows you. Safe shows you the risk of changing. It doesn't show you the cost of staying. And once you can see both sides of that equation, the real cost of safe, not just the imagined cost of change, the decision looks different. It doesn't necessarily get easier, but it gets clearer. And clearer is where better decisions start. Thank you so much for joining me here on this episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. I'll see you on the next one.