Don’t fear change, manage it

Over the years, I’ve written more columns than I can count about the need to accept change, I guess that is my area of greatest concern for businesses and communities.  Maybe it is time to be a bit more candid.  Change is not a wave headed toward us. It already broke over our Main Street communities years ago, and many are still standing in the runoff wondering when it will arrive.

Business owners I chat with nearly every day know the feeling. The phone rings differently now. The customer walks in already knowing more than the clerk. The competitor down the road or three states away moved faster than anyone expected. Economic trends are changing as well, online shopping is no longer something the wealthy do, nearly everyone does.  None of that is coming someday. It is already here, sitting at the counter or in our community, waiting for us to notice and step to the plate and act.

History can be a blunt teacher as was shown by Eastman Kodak. Kodak’s own engineer built the first digital camera in 1975, decades before most households owned one. Company leadership looked at the invention and quietly filed it away, worried it would threaten the film business that paid the bills. By 1996 Kodak was worth close to thirty billion dollars and employed well over a hundred thousand people. Sixteen years later it filed for bankruptcy, brought down by the very technology it had invented and refused to build a future around. That is not a story about bad luck. It is a story about a company that saw change coming and chose comfort over management of it.

Main Street does not get to sit this one our either. New federal legislation, the AI for Main Street Act, has moved through Washington this year specifically because policymakers recognized a widening gap between large companies that can afford new tools and small operators who cannot. Recent research backs up the urgency. Among the smallest employer firms, adoption of generative tools doubled in a single year, and businesses with any kind of online presence are adopting at nearly seven times the rate of those without one. This gap is not closing on its own. It closes when owners decide to close it.

Here is where I want to be honest rather than alarmist, because fear does not build anything. Nearly half of new businesses in this country still close within five years, and the reasons are rarely one dramatic mistake. It is usually a slow accumulation of small refusals. Refusing to update the website. Refusing to learn the new payment system. Refusing to ask a younger employee to explain what everyone else already knows. None of those refusals feel fatal in the moment. Strung together over a few years, they are exactly how a Main Street fixture disappears.

Managing change is different from surviving it. Surviving change means reacting once the damage shows up in your revenue numbers, scrambling for a fix after the customers have already found somewhere else to spend their money. Managing it means building a habit of asking, every month, what has shifted in how your customers find you, pay you, and talk about you, and then making one deliberate adjustment before the shift forces your hand. That habit costs almost nothing. It does not require a consultant or a new department. It just requires admitting, out loud, if necessary, that comfort is not a strategy and never was one.

I think about business owners in my own county who have done this well. They did not chase every new gadget that crossed their desk. They picked the one or two changes that mattered to their customers, learned them properly, and left the rest alone. That is management, not surrender. It is entirely possible to hold onto what makes a local business feel like home, the greeting at the door, the memory of how someone takes their coffee, while still updating how you run the register and how you show up online. The heart of the business and the tools of the business are two different questions and confusing them is how good owners talk themselves out of necessary change.

The businesses and the communities still standing in ten years are not the ones hoping change slows down. They are the ones who decided to steer it instead of getting run over by it. That decision does not require a big budget or a technology department. It requires one honest look in the mirror and a willingness to make a change before the market demands one.

While the above addresses businesses, the same holds just as true for our communities. If we cling to the past, trying to avoid what is coming, we all lose, plain and simple. If we meet change head on, all the while managing it so we can maintain those things we hold most dear, we have hope of survival. Anything short of that is suicide pact with destiny. Don’t fear change, manage it, adapt to it, harness the good that comes with it. By doing that, your community wins in the long-run and future
generations will look back on you for your efforts.

John A. Newby, a Chamber CEO, Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant, and International Speaker is the author of the “Building Main Street, Not Wall Street” a column dedicated to helping local businesses & communities build stronger foundations allowing them to thrive in a world where local is lost to Wall Street interests. His email is john@truly-local.org

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