The Dog on the Nail
There's an old story about a man who notices a dog lying on a porch, howling every few minutes.
He asks the owner, "What's wrong with your dog?"
"He's lying on a nail."
Confused, the man asks, "Why doesn't he move?"
The owner shrugs.
"Because it doesn't hurt enough."
Whether the story is true doesn't really matter. The point certainly is, and it's on my mind a lot lately.
Summer is the busiest time of year for many tourism businesses. Every day is a blur of guests, emails, phone calls, staffing issues, cleaning rooms, preparing experiences and solving the next problem before it becomes tomorrow's crisis.
In that environment, there's very little room left to step back and ask a bigger question.
"Is the way we're doing this actually working?"
Most people already know which parts of their operation aren't working. They feel the friction every day. The spreadsheet has grown into an unmanageable monster. The inbox is impossible to stay on top of. The booking process requires too many manual steps. Customer information is scattered across three places. Follow-ups don't happen because something more urgent always gets in the way.
It's frustrating, inefficient and sometimes costing thousands of dollars. But it's familiar. And that's where the dog on the nail comes in. The discomfort of the current situation is known. The discomfort of changing feels uncertain.
Learning something new takes time. Migrating data sounds painful. What if the new system isn't as good? What if the team doesn't like it? What if this isn't the right moment?
So nothing changes.
People want things to improve, but the familiarity of today's frustration often feels safer than the uncertainty of changing it. We're funny creatures that way. The busy season reinforces the cycle.
"I'll deal with it after summer."
Then autumn becomes catching up, winter becomes planning and spring becomes preparing. Before long, another summer arrives, and the same conversations are happening around the same spreadsheet, inbox and manual processes.
I've fallen into this trap myself at times. Founders build workarounds instead of fixing root causes because we're trying to maintain momentum. We postpone improvements because there are customers to support, meetings to attend and products to build. Eventually, we realise we're spending more energy working around problems than solving them.
Meaningful change almost never arrives at a convenient time, and your business doesn't pause for you to improve it. At some point, you simply decide that the pain of staying where you are has become greater than the discomfort of moving.
That's when things begin to change.
More often than not, the thing we feared turns out to be far less painful than the thing we tolerated for years.
Sometimes progress isn't about finding a better solution.
It's about deciding you've been lying on the nail long enough.
Ready to support the sector that supports us all?
#GetRoaming and let’s build a more connected, resilient, and thriving Canada, one traveller, one town, one story at a time.
Yours in tourism, innovation and startups,
Founder and CEO, Roamlii
