What a Ferrari F40 can teach you about business.
This is a Ferrari F40. This is my dream car (that I will own one day). 😍🥰
(photo taken by my dad, Gary Walton)
Why is it my dream car?
I mean, just look at it. But also, in my opinion, it is the epitome of driving experience. There are no driving aids, no drift modes, no airbags, no radio, no air con, no traction control, ABS etc. Just you, the car (and a 2.9 litre twin-turbo V8), and the road/track.
And you have to be a pretty good driver to drive one hard, there is nothing to save you. If you get it wrong it might kill you. That excites me.
When I started driving I had a Hyundai Getz 1.1 that had a terrible height to weight ratio, but it was good fun. I thought I was Kimi Raikkonen in that car (I actually went around a bend a bit quick on one of my lessons with my dad and when we’d got round I announced proudly “Kimi Raikkonen” and we laughed about it).
I then went through a couple more cars and got a MK2 MX5 Jasper Conran (RWD, more power than I’d had before). My talent was not great and I crashed it fairly soon after. I then crashed my mum’s MX5 into a roundabout a few months later because my talent was still not there.
Learning to drive
There is a point to this, I promise! 😃
A few cars later, having been driving for a while and learning a lot since the unfortunate demise of my poor little MX5, my dad taught me to heel and toe. When I started I had no idea what I was doing and over time and with lots of practice it became second nature. Now I do it as an automatic part of driving when I’m changing down gears.
Likewise, left foot braking. The same day my dad taught me to heel and toe I decided to give it a go without warning. If you’ve ever learned left foot braking you’ll probably know that it seems simple in principle, so you stick your left foot on the brake and then somehow forget how to remove it from the peddle. If you didn’t have a seatbelt on you would most likely end up through the windscreen… yeah… that happened. Over time, I learned how to do it without trying to throw myself and my passengers through the windscreen.
Eventually, after wanting one since I was about 10, I got a Lotus Elise that I daily drove for 6 years.
(photo also courtesy of my dad, a freelance dealership and motorsport photographer — www.garywalton.photography)
However, it’s another car that as well as weighing less than a tonne, is mid-engine, RWD, has a high power to weight ratio, and has nothing to save me if I get it wrong.
The first time I took it on track I thought I was billy big balls because I could drive faster than most people on the road. I found out in about 5 seconds that I still knew nothing about driving or racing lines and was the slowest on the track at the start of the day. I increased my lap time by about 28 seconds that day with tuition from an instructor. I increase that further the more I do it and the more I learn.
Over time I’ve become a better driver and now a lot of these things that I didn’t know are second nature, but I still have more experience and learning to do before I grab the keys to an F40.
“What does this have to do with business”, I hear you say?
Well, when you start your business you don’t know what you’re doing. You might have worked in corporate or even just started out because you love what you do and don’t want to just be making money for someone else.
It’s hard.
Getting sales is hard and suddenly you have to socialise with people and learn marketing, sales, bookkeeping, finance, how to run a business, etc. Then as time goes on you get used to it and it becomes second nature. You might even outsource some of it.
Then you move into the next phase, get staff, get more business, the numbers get bigger and you’re learning all over again.
You realise that you’re spending too much time working in your business and as a result don’t have enough time to work on it, grow it and improve it, so you put things in place to enable that to happen and to take you out of it more.
Then a virus comes and decimates the country and, with it, the economy. Suddenly you need to watch how much money you’ve got in the bank, how much money you owe to people, how much people owe you and you need to stop spending money frivolously on stuff you definitely don’t need. You learn that you can in fact do more with less. It’s another learning curve that you have to go through.
Each new phase that you go through is a challenge that must be overcome, and each time it makes you a stronger and more resilient person and business owner.
Business is forever learning. If you think you know everything, I can tell you for nothing that you don’t. In order to grow, we must be continuously learning and making small improvements that compound to large improvements over time.
You can’t just hop in the driver's seat and stick the proverbial “drift mode” on when it comes to running a business. There are no shortcuts to where you want to get to, which is why having the correct systems, staff, and support in place is absolutely key to your success and to making the right decisions at the right time so that it doesn’t kill you.
