Business Rehab: Detoxing from Addictive Patterns that Hinder Success

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Today we ask the question, what patterns is your business addicted to that are toxic?
Let us help you with some business rehab. All right, I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey, guys. All right, gentlemen, it's business intervention time. People out there have businesses that are addicted to some toxic habits. It's hard not to be when I think some of the underlying foundations of how we structure, grow and lead businesses are using models that kind of cause the problems. So honestly, it's probably an episode where we could probably do multiple shows, I imagine, just because there's a lot. This is fertile ground here. Our listeners probably come up with some great ideas as well, but let's dive in with some of ours. Tullio, what comes to mind when you think of business addictions that need an intervention?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:26)
So this is probably the biggest pattern, habit, business addiction that's out there, and that's addiction to short-term profits. Really, just the constant focus on quarterly earnings, cost-cutting measures, often harming quality, neglecting long-term investments like R&D, or just throwing R&D completely out the window, employee development, forget about it, and then ultimately, the symptoms is customer relationship suffer from this too.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:04)
So let's talk about those impacts, Tullio. So you mentioned customer relationships there. What other impacts does this have on a business?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:13)
Well, the thing is, the employees end up feeling the brunt of this, because there's tremendous pressure for everyone to produce a lot more and a lot faster. So you end up with a lot of burnout.
This also impacts customer loyalty, because customers can feel when the focus is not on them, it's on profits. And also, you end up using market relevance. It's just a bad combination, you got burned out employees, so they're not giving their best. Innovation has gone out the window because there's no R&D, there's nothing invested in there. And customers starting to feel sort of like this desire, they're just a number that they want to achieve. So it's just that combination has a very negative impact on the business.

**Ash Maher** (3:06)
Tullio, it's funny, I have an example story where I saw this happen in real time, where us as a team, we were having a hard time meeting demands, but they always still prioritized new business. And we're thinking to ourselves, oh my goodness, we're already struggling to meet that. But because of the short-term profits that would come from signing and closing another deal, all of that was thrown out the wayside. So I saw it infrastructurally hurt the entire organization, when everybody to your point was burnt out, everyone had an attitude, no one was happy because no one benefited from the new business, except for the people at the top, by the biggest smiles on their faces, knowing we just had a conversation.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:46)
I think the boss is singing there, he's all, yes, they're doing more, they're doing it faster, they're working extra hard or whatever, but then it's like-

**Ash Maher** (3:53)
I'm taking all the money.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:54)
Yeah, what cause?

**Stephen Sakach** (3:56)
We have to train some new employees now, the ones that-

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:59)
I think we're going to cover the hyper growth addiction probably in a future episode, but that's another one. That's a whole other one too. Just grow, grow, grow.

**Ash Maher** (4:11)
What are the root causes of this?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:14)
The biggest cause is this fear of market volatility, but primarily is shareholder pressure. Now, at a deeper level, what the real cause is, it's probably the biggest epidemic that exists in the world today, which is people-pleasing disease, right? You know, we know what that looks like, is this desire to always be pleasing everybody. This is the business version of the people-pleasing disease.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:44)
But just one group of people.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:45)
Right, shareholders, shareholder, right? It's like, as long as we're pleasing the shareholders, we're good, you know? So that's part of the addiction, is this needing to please the shareholders and the market analysts and to be ahead of the competitive landscape. It becomes its own thing for the sake of its own thing, right? And that's what makes it a pattern, a toxic pattern, because there's this fear of instability, the desire to maximize shareholder value quickly, and that's at the cost of any long-term vision or sacrificing long-term vision, or even the benefit that would come from things like R&D and investing in people, et cetera. That's just, it's not, that doesn't matter. It's like, you know, as long as we make them happen for this quarter. But there's a big problem with that.