CAREFUL! Brain Drains Can Become Competitors Gain

Apologize For What?  Poor Volume Growth?

When your sales volume begins to slow down enough to consider cutting deeper into the cost of the operations, pay attention to how you allow those cuts to be made.  Lost volume might be due to poor merchandising, not because the economy is slowing down.  I have watched many business models struggle with less than good marketing methods enough to cause them a considerable amount of lost business volume.  I have watched many business models perform their marketing responsibilities so poorly that their sales growth is hampered.  I have witnessed business leaders fail to provide the right kind of attention to customer service.  I have seen many business leaders create a sour pattern for sales growth and actually consider that slowing pattern a part of the result of a poor economy.  As a result, they believe their next best business move is to trim costs.  It all seems to make sense to those who miss seeing this pattern of marketing failure.

Business models who misunderstand how vital and important a good marketing effort is to the growth of their sales volume are the models that suffer the most in the profit of their operations.  The lack of understanding for how important good marketing is to the total profit picture is a shortcoming that plagues business leaders who cannot ever seem to find a healthy pattern for improved sales growth.  These kinds of business leaders fail to fully comprehend how important the idea of serving the customers is to the patterns of growing sales volumes.  Many of the business leaders who suffer from this kind of marketing weakness do not know or recognize that they have acquired many hidden marketing afflictions.  Their style of business leadership gets in the way of improving sales volumes.  They lack the proper skills to manage serving the customers well.  As a result, they never seem to really produce any measurable patterns of improved volume.  They are quietly plagued by poor marketing skills.  Sales become very stagnant to these kinds of business operators.  Good marketing techniques is not a skill set that they perform very well.  They do not know how to properly grow their business volume.
      
When a business model becomes stagnant in sales performance, the first and most natural thing to do is to begin evaluating the general marketing condition's.  The first place we look to do this is to check out the health of the economy.  The economy becomes our immediate excuse.  It becomes our most natural villain.  If you have these tendencies, which many business leaders do, it will be difficult to see marketing weaknesses exercised by your leaders, staff and employees.  As a result, slow downs in business sales volume will be met with operational cut backs that may need to be made.  Included in those business cuts will likely be payroll expenses.  In most business models, payroll and inventory combine to make up about 68% of the costs associated to the company gross sales.  Payroll gets a lot of cutting attention.  Be smart when you go to cut payroll.  Make sure you do not cut talent deep enough to allow that talent to become part of your competitors library of skills.  Many self-taught business leaders make this simple business mistake.  Work hard to avoid it.  Pay special attention to keeping talent in your own fort.

CAREFUL!  Your talent might end up in the competitors fort.

Many business leaders believe sales volume and the growth of sales is a natural and routine result that all business models normally generate.  Many business leaders think that the resulting volume of sales their business model produces is exactly the level of volume they should be producing.  Most business leaders who suffer from the lack of strong marketing skills also suffer from wrong justification methods that help them to support why their sales volumes do not typically improve.  The two characteristics usually go hand in hand.  The poor marketing skills also carry the most protection packages to justify why the good and effective marketing techniques are absent.  One usually follows the other.  It is very predictable.  It is very common.  It is also difficult to detect.  Those who are afflicted have developed wonderful ways to disguise the lack of marketing skills they do not recognize they fail to possess.  They become very good at describing why their sales volumes 'cannot' improve.  They do not see, feel nor possess the proper skills to change the patterns their business model misses in the growth that can occur.  The only thing left to do to keep the business temporarily alive is to cut, cut, cut.  This is where the first symptoms appear.

Marketing is one of the three legs to the stool of success any business model performs.  A good marketing plan with a good head to manage that plan is a vital part of business growth and sales volume increases.  If your business model lacks sales volume growth, you may be afflicted with a poor marketing plan or worse yet, a poor head to develop that healthy marketing plan.  It may be you or your business manager that lack the proper skills to produce increased sales volumes.  If both of you are afflicted with this shortcoming, you may actually be lying to yourselves to cover up your marketing weaknesses.  This is a typical pattern that I see in the failing business models I am asked to repair.  It is more common than one might first think.  I see this lack of understanding a lot in my business travels.  Good marketing skills come with a price.  Poor marketing skills come with a deeper price.  Some business leaders just simply fail to grasp this truth.  They continue to operate their methods of leadership within the confines of failed marketing ways.  They then perform the only remaining responsibility...cut, cut, cut.  They become convinced that this is what a good business does.  They accept the loss of good business growth as being part of the natural ways their local economy provides.  They misunderstand good marketing techniques and skills.  They resort to tightened accounting skill sets to survive.

This kind of pattern for business leadership is a pattern that is ripe for a strong competitor to destroy.  A competitor that possess better marketing skill sets is a competitor that will easily draw away more business volume from the troubled pattern these leaders work so hard to protect.  When this happens, the troubled business model will run out of logistic ways to keep on cutting.  It will eventually dry up to become a business model with no proper levels of inventory available on hand for the customers to select and it will have no revenues to properly staff how it services what it hopes to sell.  The good inventory and staff have been reduced and cut to the bone of destruction.  A good competitor will destroy what little sales volumes remain.  The struggling business model will eventually fail.  It's marketing efforts will be at fault.  The leaders that disguise why they do what they do will cause this effect to overcome their efforts to prevent its failure.  The competition will gain the best employees they eventually released.  I have seen this kind of resource pattern work its ways in every single marketplace I have traveled.  Every single one.  It is as common as light bulbs.  It is as misunderstood as gravity.

CAREFUL...brain drains can become your competitors gain.

How do we prevent our competitor from acquiring our most skilled employees?

Apologize For What?  Training My Competitors Employees?

I have seen many strong competitors benefit from the acquisition of expelled employees from another business model that could not responsibly hold on to the skilled workers they once possessed.  It is not a strange phenomenon.  In fact, it is quite common.

I have made this simple mistake myself in my own career.  I once employed people who were reaching out inside my business environments that I did not clearly understand or recognize as talent to be developed.  They were challenging people who 'pressed on' for better results.  As they 'pressed on' for those improved results, they appeared to be 'bucking' against the ways I was trying to manage.  Unfortunately, I could not see the high levels of skills they possessed.  I was too busy working on protecting what I did not know.  I was trying harder to ram my style of operations into their wonderful growing ways.  I placed a large bit into their mouths and expected them to turn my way every time I jerked on the reigns.  If I lacked vision in my marketing efforts, they had no say in how those skills could hurt my results.  I limited my growth and controlled their skills for helping my models repair.  I missed it.  I did not nor would not admit that, however.

Those employees were filled with unique skills that had good talent within their structure.  I just wanted to control them in my way.  I wanted them to produce what I thought was right.  Unfortunately, I was wrong in what I thought was right.  My marketing skills at that time were limited and somewhat average in strength and understanding.  As a result, I placed a terrible limit on the growth those talented employees could offer to my business models.  They left my employ.  I can think of six of them that have moved on to other business models and produced incredibly strong success results.  These tremendous souls were once employed inside my ship.  I did not have the proper skill sets to keep them.  They flourished somewhere else.  My competitors reaped their benefits.  I lost.

Many business leaders do this very exact same thing.  They do not fully comprehend how much talent they currently possess and they get too busy cutting out what helps that talent to perform its magic.  As a result, they suffer from lack of growth and begin to manage how much to cut.  The spiral to failure begins.  These are the early symptoms of poor business leadership.  It takes one to know one.  I are one.  I recognize this hidden plague so well.  It governs the pattern for loss that many business leaders try to convince themselves is the fault of the economy.  It is not the economies fault.  It is the fault of poor marketing leadership.

Sales volumes should be going upwards...not sideways nor downwards.  Without increases in sales volumes, the inflation of costs will eventually over-take the revenues a business model produces.  A business leader cannot continue to cut, cut and cut and still expect to offer, offer and offer.  Consumers prefer to honor when they are offered, offered and offered.  That kind of marketing effect cannot occur in a strong cutting environment.  The two do not mix well.  Many business leaders try hard to blend these two patterns.  They work like oil and water.  They do not mix well.  Cutting and growth are two completely different patterns of movement.  They will not run tandem inside a successfully promoted business environment.  One will expect or force the other to go away.  Get this down completely.  Your business model will require that you get this down thoroughly.

You will need business volume growth in order to survive long term success.  You will suffer greatly if you fail to market your wares properly.  If you are already on the cutting routine and you are now faced with removing your talent, I will pray for you.  Your marketing techniques have completely gone quiet.  They have disappeared and your lack of volume growth is proving to your business model that it is true.  Wake up.  You have a marketing leadership problem.  Your business model is suffering from this problem.  Your service to customers has weakened beyond your vision.  You may be missing what you need to do.  As a result, you are seeing only the cuts you may need to do to save where your model is headed to be.  Your competition will enjoy your failed levels of proper business recognition.  The brain drain you plan to perform will be their gain.  They will turn those wonderful skills into working ways for improving sales.

Some business models get it.  They fully comprehend how important proper marketing skill sets work.  They get it.  They work their models to promote growth.  They reach out and produce what once was not there.  They rely on growth to help them manage what they need to do.  They are responsible to the required cuts all business models must perform, but hey do not misunderstand when those cuts run too deep.  The good models use this kind of gauge to help them make the proper marketing shifts.  They go to work on finding better ways to serve their customers well.  They completely recognize how much improvement they must work to increase to the service patterns their models must learn to offer.  They begin the war to increase their sales volumes to prevent losing the skillful people they have hired to help them win.  They become better able to keep the good ones in their own fort.

Your competition will not object to hiring your most talented people.  They can easily use the good ones you groomed for them.  As much as this is an uncomfortable subject to share, I see it happen more than most would be willing to admit.  The business models who suffer the most are the ones who lose the most.  It is simple science.  They are also the ones who cannot keep the best talent inside their own fort.  In the end, they will promote weaker people to do the weaker stuff.  Unfortunately, they will continue to expect better results.  Only the competition will enjoy this pattern of operations.

CAREFUL!  Brain drains can become your competitors gain.

Until next time...