Why Are Markets So Uncertain For Small Business And Retailers?

Let's Help The Consumers Achieve!

Retailing used to be a simple process.  Someone in a little area had a special love for baking cookies or fixing cars and before you know it, off they go to open up a small business.  Since they liked windsurfing, they decided to open a windsurfing shop!  That’s what they know.  That is what their true passion is.  That is how most small business models got off the ground.  It was a simple passion to do what they knew and loved to do.  It was very simple.

Once they opened up shop, hung a shingle outside to let everyone else know who they are and what they did, they began the process of moving money around.  Not knowing how to move money around properly, they began the slightly confusing trek to operate their business model...emotionally.  This process lead them to discover the art of finding a ton of little nose bleeds.  Some nose bleeds were more serious than others.  Moving money around for keeps was not as easy as one might expect.  In most cases, the home wallet took a small beating.  Hopefully the passion did not fall into the same ditch.

If the passion survived the economic ditch, and after a bit of time and experience, some necessary adjustments were made.  The adjusted small business models began to deliver a little bit of business returns.  Most of those ‘self-taught-business-adjuster-types’ eventually found their way onto the plus columns of their properly recorded balance sheets inside their business books.  Those were the ones able to survive what mistakes they could constantly find.   The school of hard knocks ultimately helped them to mold their ways into becoming part of the small army of pretty savvy operators.  Their business models had become worth something to parade around town.  They learned the art of employing a few people and their futures where no longer as dim as once before.

What happened?  Where are these savvy small time business owners today?  Where are the people they once employed?  A good deal of them have all but disappeared.  Many are so strapped down with operational debts, ever increasing business costs, lost consumer buying abilities and complicated patterns of consumer diversity that they cannot see the forest of growth opportunities through the immediate line of towering trees.  It has all become overwhelming.  Hope has become delegated lower down that pole of priorities.  Survival has become the current fire of attention.

For those remaining in the small business game, they are the sharp ones.  Even the lucky ones have taken on too much water to survive.  What’s more, the remaining sharp ones are working their way through the maze of economic change, through the effort to find useful technological advancements and trying to discover some of the more clever trials the new consumers have quietly become accustomed to using in their desire to honor where they go to buy what they buy.  All of this small business effort has quietly become the new daunting challenge.  It consumes the life of the owner’s clock and spits out little rewards that do not always measure up to the return the owners had once felt tolerable.  Job creation is not one of their current concerns.  Survival has taken up all of that space.

The uncertainty of effort coupled with the uncertainty of returns has become such a dominating part of the daily pattern for most small business owners that hope is dwindling fast.  These unwanted patterns have spurred the need for small business owners to become more innovative in how they learn to find better ways to process what they do.  It has unfortunately become more than fixing cars, baking cookies and surfing the winds.  The small business owner has recently discovered that they must learn how to behave like they are writing a thesis for the Harvard Business Review, or MIT, hoping to get at least an A+ on the paper.  If they fail writing a great paper plan, their business model will certainly fail.

 

Even then, the consumer markets remain uncertain.  So why are the consumer markets so uncertain?  Holy cow, all of this thinking has become very complicated.  Does anybody dispute this truth?  Let's get real.  We aren't in Kansas anymore.  In fact, even Kansas is complicated.

Let’s take a cleaner look at what small business owners and retailers are facing.

Page two.

When Consumers Win, Business Wins!

There is not a soul in business who does not understand the realities of “who moved the cheese?”  The cheese moved.  I get that.  So do many other savvy operators.  Now the trick has become trying to get the rat to the cheese.  Small business owners have come to recognize where the cheese needs to be.  The real trick is discovering an effective way to get the rat to the cheese.

Just because we get a cruise ship landed next door to our downtown shopping area does not necessarily mean that those rats will wander about where the retailers live.  Getting the rats’ to go find the cheese is tricky business.  In this complicated and deeply competitive world of discretionary patterns, rats and cheese locations are hard to combine.  The rats have become very difficult and more than enough discerning to be easy to please.  They desire perfection in spending.  They want extras for free, discounts to move, and service outside the owners ability to afford and provide.  This is not a match made in heaven.  The consumer, who has always been somewhat fickle, is now more determined to expect even more.  I am sorry to report that truth.  As Socrates once eluded, it is what it is.

Some business leaders are trying to find bigger cheese.  Maybe bigger cheese is easier to see?  In the world of business we call this trend, ‘big box’ retailing!  That worked for a small while, but the little downtown's suffered greatly from this consumer transition.  Every small business owner had to properly adjust for the consumer buying shift that this trend offered.  It eventually gutted most small business models.  The lost consumer support they experienced laid down some very heavy wood.  The world of marketing told all of small business America to specialize, shift to a boutique-like presentations and start learning how to niche market.  The mass buyers are no longer yours!  Kiss ‘em goodbye forever.  Get new customers!

Now, guess what?  A new shift is taking place in America.  The big box retailers are beginning to see some consumer shifts that they do not fully comprehend.  The tech savvy world is growing.  Tomorrow’s consumer is tired of long lines, a complex list of clever misrepresentations, dominance of marketing, insensitive personal touch, heavy profiteering and the residuals of a continued list of left-over footprints that disrespect employees, the sense of community, disinterested humanity and the failing protection of our environment.  The big box retailers have not approached these problems with any measurable sense of solution.  This consumer pattern is not a small bug in the computer software.  It is big stuff.  Even Wal-Mart is witnessing strikes, consumer picket lines, media attacks and lost volume.  Wal-Mart brings on a battery of lawyers every single time they try to expand into a new market region.  The opposition is real and in some cases, very serious.  This kind of activity was never part of my growing business environment when I was building my downtown retail store.  Never.  It is now common place to most big box environments.  In my world of leadership, I call this kind of activity 'a clue.'  People!  The consumer has had it.

Again, Socrates said it best…it is what it is.

The rats are becoming thorny as business models work to find better ways for delivering their cheese.  Monster debt policies, shrinking incomes, increasing regulations, social over-management, jobless anxieties and a very lost bunch of governmental leaders who cannot remove their high level of internal bickering have helped to fuel this high level of consumer uncertainty.  The rats are pissed off.  I know.  I am a rat.  I buy stuff, too.

I am a customer who does not like what I see.  I am tired of the government telling me what I want.  I am certainly tired of an over-dressed bunch of employees, my congressman and senators, working over-time to try to convince me what is better for me as a patron of my own world of existence.  They demand that I stop doing certain things like the types of hats allowed to be worn in schools.  Sometimes they even govern the colors of clothing we are allowed to wear!  In some certain business districts, the business owners ‘must’ pay additional development premiums to help the city market its downtown.  When did the city clerk become a marketing manager?  How did that happen?  When did the city become part owner of my business model?  Some cities even tax the small business for having fire and security alarms located in their facilities!  Oh, spare me the logical explanation for doing that kind of silly thing.  The consumer is us.  The consumer is tired of all of this foolishness.

The CEO’s of some of the most powerful business models on this globe rallied together this week to inform the policy makers of impending doom if they do not wake up and start going to work on some very serious issues.  I read the comments from the Wall Street Journal of those meetings.  I did not sense the rules-makers truly ‘getting it.’  Did you?  It appeared as if they were nodding their heads up and down as if to quietly say under their breath, “Sure Cowboys and Indians, I will take your wooden nickels of concerns.  Now, now…settle down and go back into your corners like good little soldiers.”

Here’s the deal.  It can all be summed up in one simple question.  When did 313 million patrons/constituents/employers/the voter lose control of about 536 country employees…congressmen and senators?  The last time I checked this out, they are hired to serve us.  Did we forget what our true role is here?  I fire an employee who does not ‘get it.’  Anyone who works for me fully understands this rule.  In my 37 years of business leadership, I bet I have only had to explain that rule to a couple of stubborn employees.  The rest of them can sense my seriousness on that issue, without any long dissertations.  Even a deer knows when the fence is too tall to jump.

We need to wake up.  We need not wait until tomorrow.  Start clearing your minds up, get rid of the apathy and get more involved in your local governmental process where they are making the rules.  Demand better performances or fire them.  That is exactly how I run my business models.  ‘Get it’ or ‘get out.’  Go tie up someone else and their dream.  Leave mine alone.  If you want to build a bigger dream, go try your own personal business model.  Until then, you work for someone else.  If that is too direct, then maybe its time the truth about these relationships must come to light.

We need to stand up and take back the control we have quietly allowed to go away.  Here’s why.  Consumers are frustrated.  That is why the cheese is so hard to deliver.  They do not know where their life happiness is going to appear.  Uncertainty is forever creeping up on their daily lives and certainty is almost gone.  Consumers are feeling this pinch.  It isn't hippie stuff.  It is a real growing emotional cultural problem that has been screaming for attention for far too long.  Until we get our culture of complex patterns more stabilized, with a greater sense of justice, increased fairness and an improved respect for the right process of freedom…the consumer sickness every business model is currently witnessing will not comfortably go away.

As Socrates so aptly coined it, “It is what it is.”  We need to get more serious about reducing the debt.  We need to get more serious about requiring the leaders we hire to perform better.  We need to do a better job finding smarter, more respectful and appreciative leaders.  Until we act on these simple leadership roles, we can all spin around each other trying to put out the real fires our consumers are fighting.

Business leaders, wake up and demand better.  Your futures are slipping away at a very fast pace.

Why are markets so uncertain?  Get better employees making the rules.  You see, we do not work for them.  They work for us.  We can fire them when they whine and complain about the stupid stuff they continue to support.  That is exactly what I do in my business models.  I fire them.

Until next time...