What do you do when your whole industry is in a long, slow decline?
There are a lot of options — but sometimes the most successful path is the one you least expect.
Take Denny’s. They’ve closed 150 stores in the last two years.
And breakfast restaurants have been sliding downhill for decades.
And when not just your business but the whole landscape is in trouble, every instinct screams the same thing: get out and do find something new!
Maybe you’re a drug company, so you get into supplements.
Or you own a burger joint, so you open a fine dining spot.
You've got a distributorship, so you launch a trucking company.
It feels like escape. It's almost never escape.
The CEO of Denny's didn't take the bait. He went back to basics. Pushed the 24-hour model, leaned into the wholesome thing, tried to make it land with younger people.
From the outside, that's the courageous call. Because its boring, unglamorous, and exactly right.
The part nobody wants to hear is: every industry has problems. But at least with your problems, you’ve probably figured out some of the answers.
That’s the risk of chasing shiny objects: you end up trading a set of problems you understand for a set you don't.
Not that it will save you every time.
(Private equity bought Denny’s in January. RIP.)
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Run the shiny-object test
Next time you're tempted to jump into a new business or industry, grab a sheet of paper and do this:
On the left, list the problems in your current business.
On the right, list the problems with the industry you're about to jump into.
Is your left list a lot longer than your right list?
If so, don’t jump into anything. Do some digging. (The best way: talk to people who are actually doing it.)
Michael
P.S. I’m running a couple of in-person workshops this fall, all about helping you hammer out your plan to launch a business. We’ll definitely be talking shiny object syndrome.
We’re capping them at 15 people each, so we can really dig in and make progress.
If that sounds up your alley, get on the waitlist and you’ll be the first to hear when we open up enrollment.
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