Thinking Out Loud – Episode 8

This is the eigth episode in a series called Thinking Out Loud. In these videos, Armando Lanuti, the President of Creative Works, shares some of his thoughts on business, leadership, growth, operations, and anything else on his mind. Below is a transcript of some of the points he discusses in the video.

Hey everybody. Today I want to talk to you about a topic of proactive or being reactive or I’m a big sports guy, so a lot of people like to talk about maybe offense and defense.
This is something that every business owner should practice in their business is that, that preventative maintenance, that proactiveness.

So whether you’re running a family entertainment center and that means taking those checklists of all the things you should have in your facility, all those different attractions, walking it, making sure all your lights are on, making sure that everything is clean, taking that extra step before something breaks to ensure that it’s always operational that’s very important.

This is also in relation to things like your competitors. So if you’ve got a product out there in business and you’re trying to develop it, you’re trying to grow it, are you proactively looking at what other people have on the market, what’s coming up, what new trends are taking place so that you can keep your product fresh and adapting or you’re being passive and just saying, “Oh, that’s good enough” and then having to react to some change in the marketplace that completely catches you off guard.

Obviously, the former is much better than the latter.

So, you definitely want to be more proactive than reactive from that standpoint and then taking on that same sports analogy, I always like to talk about being much more offense than defense.
I know there is that older adage of defense wins championships but if you actually look throughout the season and you look through most of those games that take place, a lot of times yes, defense is important and making sure that you’re protecting yourself is important but you still have to score, you can never win if you never play offense, that’s practically impossible, you have to play offense at some point.

So I much more prefer to be a little bit more risky I guess, maybe in my personal life and my businesses and I like to play offense, I like to take that chance, take that step and you know what, sometimes there is an unknown, sometimes there is something that could come up that can catch you off guard but if you never take that first step, if you never take that chance then you miss it, there is that other adage of you miss a 100% of the shots you don’t take and I’d rather be taking those shots and miss 97 of them and have just 3 of them hit, they are just out of this park from a business standpoint.

And that’s what I recommend that others do too.

So again, make sure you’re proactive in your business every day, make sure that you’re playing some offense in your business every day and go out there and get them.
We’ll talk to you soon.