How’s the financial year been? Been running hard and fast? Rushing headlong into a more uncertain world?
There’s always something new – are we using AI? How might the CGT changes affect me and my business?
We tend to treat the race like it’s a virtue in itself.
But sometimes, the greatest superpower in business isn’t the ability to keep running.
It’s the courage to stop. To pause.
To wipe the whiteboard completely clean and ask a deceptively simple question: “Why are we doing it like this?”
I wonder if every business should do this? And if they did, what would happen?
Well, we can maybe take some lessons from the past…
A useless, obselete cleaning product?
Let me take you back to the 1950s and a company you may never have heard of – Kutol.
They made a doughy, clay-like compound designed to wipe black coal soot off wallpaper.
It was a great business … until homes switched from coal heating to gas & oil.
Virtually overnight, their market vanished. They were facing ruin.
But then came the pause. The re-look.
A nursery teacher Kay Zufall, who was the sister-in-law to one of the company’s owners, looked at this obsolete cleaning product and noticed something.
Her kids loved playing with it because it was soft and malleable.
The company stopped trying to force a cleaning product onto a market that didn’t want it. They re-looked at what they had, added some food colouring, and created Play-Doh.
Oh, how I loved playing with Play Doh as a kid. The smell! The opportunities to be creative. If it didn’t work, smash it up and go again.
Hasbro sells 100M cans of the stuff every year, to this day, in 80 countries.
The Third Place
Did you know that Starbucks did not brew coffee originally?
They just sold raw coffee beans and spices in paper bags. In Seattle. Nice business.
Howard Schultz joined the company in 1982. After a trip to Milan, he saw an espresso bar, realised coffee is more than a commodity, it was an experience. A community hub. A “Third place”.
He experimented with an espresso bar inside a new store. It took off, but the executives did not back him.
He left, started a rival coffee company, raised money and then bought Starbucks in 1987, merging the 2 companies. Starbucks grew to 41,000 stores in 89 markets.
Amid the rubble, ignored gold
And then there’s Stewart Butterfield.
He spent years trying to build a massive multiplayer online video game. It flopped. Twice.
But during the wreckage of his failed game, he stepped back and looked at how his team had been working.
To survive the stress of building the game, his engineers had coded a quirky little internal chat tool just to talk to each other.
Butterfield paused, looked at the ruins of his failed game, and realised the real gold wasn’t the game at all – it was the tool they built along the way.
He shut the game down in 2012, shifted all his focus, and turned that chat tool into Slack, which was launched in 2013, and sold to Salesforce for US$28 billion in 2021.
EOFY Pause
So this brings us right here, right now, to Australia in June 2026. We are at the End of the Financial Year.
For most of us, this time of year is a mad scramble of spreadsheets, reconciliations, and closing out the books.
But EOFY isn’t just an accounting exercise. It is a natural hard stop. It is the perfect time to step away, re-think and go again.
I challenge you over the coming weeks to consciously stop. Pause. Allow the noise of the last twelve months to settle, and let your brain breathe.
Look at your business, your team, or your product as if a blank sheet of paper.
Ask yourself:
- What are we doing just because “that’s the way we’ve always done it“?
- What hidden gem are we sitting on right now that we are completely misinterpreting?
- What do we need to let go of to make room for what’s next?
New ideas, new products, and entirely new futures don’t usually arrive when you’re running at full speed.
They arrive when you stop.
This EOFY, give yourself the permission to pause, to re-look, and to start again.
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