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July 22, 2012

When Determination And Criticism Shake Hands.

There are a lot of things a person can do to help improve their business world and produce better results.  None of us are perfect.  None of us are disciplined enough to do it all extremely well.  That much is true.  We live in a complicated world with many distractions that easily interfere with how well we really could be performing.  What's more, even though we could perform better, sometimes we simply do not.  We are human...we error.

However, there are good performers, fair performs and poor performers.  The world is made up of all three kinds.  If your competition is made up of people in the two lower categories you might have a chance to do some business that counts.  On the other hand, if your competition is made up with good performers all around your business life you will find the going rather tough to travel.  Competition sets the mark as to how well your business model will be able to perform.  Having excellent competitiveness on the other side will either teach you how to compete better or destroy your efforts to keep up the pace.  You will decide which one it becomes.

Your determination will become a key factor in how much you learn how to become more competitive.  When your competition eats your lunch often enough, you can either fold up shop or get more determined to learn how to compete better.  You will need to add a bunch of determination to your lunch menu.

Some of my best business ideas came from my determined madness to rise up to the competitive landscape that was eating my lunch.  The competition was having their way with my customers and I was not winning as much as I needed to win.  I was obviously not as smart of an operator as they were.  They were well ahead of me in the competitive game.  They were winning more often than my business model on the same business turf we were sharing.  When it comes to business, I hate sharing.  I have become determined to figure out ways to attract more customers.  That is what a good business leader learns how to do best.  Become determined to gain more market shares.

On a side note...learn how to play fair, however.  Do not cheat, manipulate or steal the market shares your way.  Learn how to play fair, honestly and clean.  You are capable of becoming properly determined.  Do so.  That is a whole separate subject.  We are not going to cover that subject in this post.  Just trust me on this one.  Always play pair.  Become determined but keep it clean.

I met with a banker the other day.  We were chatting about several things and ideas.  We had not seen each other in a very long time so once we got caught up on each others lives we started in on business ideas and thoughts.  It was a great conversation.  We had fun and I learned some things.  It was nice getting caught up on some things in the community.

One of the subjects we shared was a little story about a packing plant business in the region.  The conversation centered around the idea that this packing plant was struggling with hard times.  Several assumptions were shared.  It was all news to me.  That packing plant employs many people.  It would not be a good thing to see them decide to pull out of the community and leave town.  It was a tough subject with the possibility of becoming a future challenge.  That banker encouraged me to find a way to figure out how to go help that plant become more successful in its business efforts.

How do you comfortably insert your business repair skills into a broken business model and gain the respect of its leadership ways without striking a badly inserted presentation on the nose?  How does the repair process comfortably begin?  How does this criticism process become something worthwhile?

Criticism is now on the table for discussion.  How do we process this kind of criticism?  When a business model begins to head down the losing path, they will become slightly defensive about where they are headed.  I repair broken business models.  Watching defensive attitudes increase is normal stuff in the world of business repair work.  We usually do not like to admit we are failing.  We become more defensive when the criticism builds up a head of steam.  This is when determination and criticism shake hands.  The two characteristics become magically linked together like best friends.  One protects the other from pain and suffering.  This is exactly what makes business repair more difficult to do.

Let's take a deeper look.

July 19, 2012

Listen, Learn And Apply

My wife and I traveled the region again yesterday.  We were celebrating so we took off early and did some shopping and recreating.  We went to a large city and scooted around and had some fun.  We are finishing up some creative work on one of our upper house decks so we decided to go 'picking' a little bit.  We scored some really cool items that will help us top off that work.

Being a diabetic, and staying disciplined on my routine diet, has helped me remain low on my sugar counts, weight and blood pressure.  Therefore, I told my wife I was going to break stride and take her out to lunch and dinner while in the city and we would enjoy eating whatever looked good on the menus!  That's what we did.

I ate like no tomorrow and had a great time doing it.  We had a ton of fun.  I will get started later today to wrap up the finishing touches on our deck, too.  I will enjoy adding the items we scored yesterday on our shopping spree.  We had fun deciding which way to go to top off the final 'look' to our new sitting area on this deck.  We had a gas doing it.  We want this area on the deck to be our morning coffee area.  At least one of them.  We have a couple of favorite spots in our landscape for having a morning Cup of Jo.  This one will be the most private one we have designed.  We are looking forward to finishing it off before the weekend arrives!  Then we can test it out!

One of the things I noticed again about our shopping habits.  Keep in mind, we are what we consider normal customers.  Before we travel to the city to go shopping for items we want to purchase we go online to narrow down the travel stops we plan to make.  We check out online several of our favorite places, first, to see if they have the items we want to pursue.  We definitely go online to find the best deals on restaurants before we go to those places to eat.  My wife "always" finds two for one deals online before we travel.  This is true for our coffee stops as well.  We enjoy shopping and make a big deal about it.  However, if you do not have a quality online presence with some good deals offered on your sites, you will not see us walk into your door.  That has become our habit.  We are not ashamed to eat a fancy dinner, two for the price of one.  We do it every single time we head out to go shopping and have fun.

I believe I see many other people doing this same thing.  I see coupons being redeemed and people choosing their stops after checking it out on their mobile devices, first.  The business models who have a good online presence for addressing these shoppers are the ones where the foot traffic is the highest.  We notice that trend a lot.

My point...listen to your customers.  Listen to how they are choosing where to shop.  Pay attention to the things that interest them.  Listen closely to how they determine where they go to shop.  I listened to all of the people walking around with each other and I heard a lot of them give wonderful clues to each other as to where they wanted to go next.  The people who were in couples, with friends and groups were sharing with each other where they wanted to go shop next.  A simple task of listening while they walked around in the stores they were frequenting could reveal how they determine where to go next.  This was really valuable information that every retailer needed to hear.  Are your sales clerks wandering about your store displays listening to this information?  I heard a lot of valuable reasons why they choose where to go.  Listen!

Next, some of the reasons for them going somewhere else to shop was not the same reasons why they were in the place where they were currently shopping.  I heard a few customers share with each other how they 'thought' this place had one thing or another but could not find it located in that place like they thought they would.  I learned that many customers were slightly mislead about what they thought they would find at the shop they were cruising through while they were looking.  Many customers were just cruising through those stores to hope and find what they felt they might discover while they were there.  Something about those stores was attractive enough to get those customers to examine their place of retail.  I noticed many shops had no foot traffic at all.  I also noticed that many stores had a ton of traffic, all of the time.  Learn what makes this difference.  Go shopping and try to discover why the crowds choose one over the other.  There are clues rolling all over the place.  Learn why they select where they go.  Learn!

Remember, I am the 24/7 guy.  I do business 24/7.  I will have fun shopping with my wife for cool items we want to add to our home projects.  However, at the same time I will be paying close attention to the reasons why large groups of people go to the places they choose.  I enjoy shopping but I enjoy more discovering why they go where they go.  Listen and learn how the consumer moves.  It is not always the same ways they moved last year!  If the reasons changed, you need to change.  Learn how to apply what you see and learn.  Be accurate.  Be open.  Be willing.  Listen and learn.  Then, apply.

Listen. learn and apply.  These are such simple terms with simple policies to understand.  However, many retailers were not paying very close attention to the kinds of things I was hearing.  Many of them had slower traffic flows and the customers were adamant about why they were leaving to go somewhere else.  The listening skills were apparently turned off.  Those were the retailers doing the least amount of register sales...by the way.  Go figure.  We had one experience that stuck out like a sore thumb.  It was so obvious that I predicted to my wife that this retailer would not be there the next time we come around.  She agreed.  How is it that these kinds of marketing errors can be so obvious to the customers yet to the owners it can become so blind to see?

Allow me to describe this one.

July 16, 2012

Peeves...What Kinds Of Things Tick You Off?

I Have A Few Of My Own!
How many pet peeves do you own?  Are there enough of them to start a small farm?

I have some pet peeves.  One of my pet peeves is that I do not like stupid business leaders.  That is evident from most of my writings.  I make no secret about that fact.  It is one of my pet peeves.  Abraham Lincoln once said, "The size of a persons intelligence is often times measured by the kinds of things they allow to 'wick' them off."  That makes perfect sense.  If I allow a freeway driver who is hogging the road, tailgating and switching lanes with a tight squeezing attitude to 'wick' me off until I am all steamed up, how smart am I?  Not very, right?  Abe Lincoln would respond in my passenger seat with a comment like this..."Well now, you seem to need a bigger problem to manage.  Why don't you get a real problem and work on it for a little while?  That foolish driver switching lanes and tailgating you seems to have dominated your thoughts for a little while."

Pet peeves.  They are the little problems we use to occupy our minds once in awhile.  They do not carry much significance, but they can dominate how our attitudes may run off course for a little while.  Pet peeves carry some pretty important power.  How many pet peeves do you own?

Pet peeves.  I have a lot of them.  I use them often, too.  They cripple my path with backwards movements, also.  They steal valuable time away from the work I should be doing with my mind.  Abe Lincoln was right on.  Sometimes I need a real problem to work on.  A real problem with some significance.  Maybe I should work on a real problem like, why do I get rid of effective talent when I feel threatened by it?  That one is a real problem.  I need to allow my mind to dig in on finding a good solution to that problem.  Why should I feel so threatened?  What weaknesses do I harbor inside that permit me to make this kind of serious business mistake?  A silly pet peeve?

I have seen many silly pet peeves dominate good business leadership opportunities in every single business environment I have managed, worked for and advised.  I have practiced allowing my own pet peeves to rise up and begin to dominate my good work, at times.  We all have this affliction.  We allow the little things that tick us off become so dominating that they can take over our mind enough to interfere with our good intelligence.  What kinds of things tick you off?  Get a closer look at what they are.  They may be the little things that are holding up your production for greatness in your leadership ways.  Those pet peeves may be worth a good healthy examination right now.

There is one thing I have discovered in my business leadership life.  Every single time I work on something I am doing wrong, something I am protecting that should never be allowed to exist, I find when I work to remove that kind of silly pet peeve my business efforts begin to improve their profitable ways.  Every single time!

Also with that discovery comes this...if I want to improve my profitability all I seem to need to do is find something I am protecting that is wrong to do and get it removed or fixed.  The anchors that drag down my good results are running inside my own ship!  Most of those anchors are attached to my silly pet peeves.  The anchors that help to drag down my profitability seem to run parallel to the things that tick me off!  Go figure!

What kinds of things tick you off?  What kinds of things have you allowed to become so important in your thinking ways that they limit how well your profitability can actually perform?  What kinds of things have grown up to become your little pet peeves?  Take a look at these little monsters.  They are killing your production.  They are holding back your success efforts.  They are quietly working overtime so that you do not catch them doing what they are doing.  They are squeezing out good thoughts, good visions and worthwhile thinking so that you can end up giving them more attention than they truly deserve.  They run some very good interference next to your efforts to build a booming business.

Picture someone who is trying to walk to the successful side of their business model and they are dragging along several long ropes with various sized anchors digging into the soil.  Imagine what kind of long hard walk they are trying to protect.  Look at them.  Holding onto every single rope and nudging every single hard step forward while the ropes and anchors scoot so slowly along the soil.  Look at them.  They are actually protecting every single one of those little pet peeves until their business walk becomes too hard to do.  The numbers are still sour, the profitability is slipping away and the people they manage are not happy about what everyone is doing.  Sound familiar?

Pet peeves.  What kinds of things are you allowing to tick you off that are interfering with how well you should be doing?  Get serious about this one.  It has a lot more to do with how you think than it does in how your business model performs.  Get very serious about looking at what kinds of things tick you off.  Is it the way someone stacks the empty boxes in the warehouse?  Is it the way someone speaks to you when you are in a crowd?  Is it the way a clerk dominates the customers friendships that compete with how you are viewed by them?  What ticks you off?  What pet peeves dominate how you think?  Find where these little things live in your mind and actions.  Learn how to get a grip on what they are.  It is little pet peeves like this that will steal your mind away from producing better results.

July 15, 2012

Why Get Organized?

Check this out.

A regular customer comes into their favorite business and wants to special order some items for a home project they are going to be doing.  They know the sales clerks quite well as well as knowing the new manager of that business.  They worked with a couple of the sales clerks gathering some product information about the project they are getting ready to do.  It will be a rather expensive project so this customer has shopped around for the best pricing.  Unfortunately, the store they like the most did not offer the lowest prices for the items they need to purchase to do this project.  So they decide to go in and see if their favorite business can match the lowest prices they have been offered from one of the competitors.

This is a familiar process in business.  In my 40 years of retail operations, this process is quite common.  Hundreds of customers shop for the best price on the street for items they want to buy and go back to their favorite retailer and ask for a matching offer.  This is very normal stuff.

This is where the manager comes in.  The customer is turned over to the manager for the special pricing request.  The manager gets involved with the customer and works up a special deal to meet the competitors pricing.  Rather than turn the detail work over to one of the sales clerks, the manager feels special and decides to handle the sale requirements and paperwork without turning it over to one of the sales clerks.  In my world of business, this is where organizations breakdown.  This manager is moving away from the organized pattern for handling customer sales.  The customer sales transaction is now at risk for having something go terribly wrong.

Managers are designed to do certain functions in their business organizations.  They hire sales clerks to do the customer sales kinds of things.  When the manager crosses over to the sales side of the transaction and begins taking care of the paperwork, the ordering and the follow-up...errors and omissions are at risk to occur.  These new 'sales' functions are not part of the organized pattern the manager is familiar with doing.  They are not part of the managers organized routine of work performed.  This 'special' sales transaction is not a routine part of the managers organized work duties.  It is destined for failure.  Something will be forgotten, omitted and unfortunately, become undone.  The transaction is following a high risk path.

Two days ago, I was doing some banking in a local bank.  In the lobby of that bank was a previous customer from one of the business models I once managed.  She was very verbal and glad to see me.  She asked where I had been.  We had a nice long chat.  She wondered if I had been doing well.  She described why she and her husband no longer shop in that business anymore.  It was an all too familiar reason.

She explained how she and her husband gave the new manager a special order for several items they needed to purchase.  She said the new manager met the pricing they found elsewhere and they worked with the new manager to order the items.  After a few weeks they went in to see how the items were doing on the special order.  The manager told them it would be about four more weeks.  She said they were puzzled since that was the original time frame the new manager offered during the original transaction.  Sound familiar?  I hear this kind of stuff more than I should hear in my leadership career.  Unfortunately, is happens well too often.

She continued with her saga.  Her husband called a couple of days later to check the manager again on the follow-up of the items they special ordered.  This time her husband got one of the sales clerks because the manager was away at some corporate meetings.  That sales clerk offered to follow-up and get back to the customer to let them know how their order was coming along.  That sales clerk discovered that the original order had not been ordered at the first time the transaction was conceived.  It was, instead, ordered when they came back in to check on how it was doing the second time.  She said her husband was disappointed with that news but since it was on order this time, they decided to wait and let it ride.

Five weeks later, the items on special order arrived.  Some of the exterior items were missing.  A different sales clerk checked it out and discovered those missing items were never ordered with the original transaction.  They were forgotten on the order.  That sales clerk found the original paperwork on the managers desk and discovered it had a side-written note on it to add these items.  Unfortunately, that note of importance was not attached to the original purchase order where the rest of the items were ordered.  It was stapled to the hand written note on the managers desk, away from where the special orders are filed.  Sound familiar?  Disorganized patterns.

When she completed her sad story about this errant transaction I asked her how much that transaction was worth?  She said, "Over $6,000."  She also said her husband cancelled the order and went somewhere else to get it done.  She went on to describe how they never go back to do business there anymore.  Here is the kicker...I bumped into that new manager about two weeks ago and I asked how business was doing?  Here was the answer.  "The recession is killing us.  Our sales have been slowly going down too much so we had to lat off one of our sales clerks."  Yadda, yadda, yadda.    

I have watched many business leaders function in this kind of disorganized state of existence.  They get so busy chasing down the stuff that is disorganized that they never seem to find the time to get organized.  They miss doing what should be done.  It happens a lot.

Why get organized?

July 11, 2012

Hire A Minimalist To Lead, Then Fail To Win Big.

The world of economics is loaded with more than enough obstacles to make growth a big challenge to achieve.  There are more than enough ways to interfere with making profits occur.  We live in interesting times and the business landscape is filled with many terrible obstacles that are making sure they get in the way of allowing a small business to grow properly.

One of the first things we tend to do as business leaders is to begin the process for cutting back.  The obstacles keep us very aware of how conservative we need to remain in our managing ways.  We cut back where we can and then some.  We trim budgets down and we skimp on anything that looks progressive and risky.  We hire business leaders who agree with our philosophies that trimming back is the right thing to do currently.  We tend to belly up next to all of the minimalists.  Those who lead from the perspectives of operating on bare minimums tend to become our best friends.  We hire minimalists to help us do our business thing.

These are the signs of a troubled business model.  They are not necessarily signs of a growing concern.  They are signs of a shrinking model.  If your model is shrinking right now, something is not happening correctly.  There are literally thousands of business models all over the world doing good business growth right now.  If you manage a business model that is not having this kind of thing happening to your business patterns right now, something is wrong.  I am not sure that a minimalist approach is the right thing to do currently.  In fact, quite the contrary.  I believe it is time to expand the marketing efforts, get more clear about what needs to be done and go make those new things happen more often.  This is not a minimalist point of view.

I think the business leaders who practice hiring a minimalist to lead their way are the business models destined to fail the most.  This is not how the biggest winners did their thing.  Business is a risk.  It always has been a risk and always will be a risk.  To try and eliminate this process of risk taking by pushing forward with a minimalist approach is destined to end up in the failure pile.  There are too many wonderful examples out there in the business world that will easily support this point of view.  Get serious.  Push your leadership mind away from any minimalists views.  They support too many parts of the components needed to make certain failure occurs.  A minimalists approach is bound to secure more failure productions.  That is exactly how too many business owners currently believe they will survive.  Most are dead wrong.

Minimizing your marketing efforts, minimizing your training efforts, minimizing your capital upgrades, minimizing your customer service staffing, minimizing your product depth, selection and promotions is exactly the perfect recipe for developing slower business volumes.  This kind of business planning is a futile attempt at survival.  It will not work for most of the business leaders who decide to take this path.  Trimming down is one thing, trimming out is another.  To cut off the fat is plain old responsible business management.  It is good stewardship.  Cutting off solid meat, bone and valuable substance is business genocide.  It will eventually guarantee the certain wreck of a business model.  Do not hire a minimalist to do your trimming work.  They do not understand what to trim and what to keep.  They will trim just because it lowers cost.  That is foolish stuff.  Do not do it.

I have seen some good business models make this very same mistake.  I have seen some very smart people participate in this kind of thinking.  They have ended up with some terribly bad results.  They also find blame in the economy.  They do not accept this kind of ideology as being real.  They want to believe that a business model that is struggling financially should practice heavy cost cutting.  They are not promoters.  They are not enterprising.  They are not sharp merchants.  They do not truly know how to generate new funds, increasing funds and growing models.  They do know how to cut back, however.  Cut-backs are their favorite resolve.  Cutting costs seems less risky and more effective in the beginning.  Unfortunately, cuts in the wrong areas of business and too deeply performed in the right areas of business cuts can sneak up and destroy good volume potential.  Minimalists do not have the ability to discern the difference between these two efforts.

Let's examine how a minimalist tends to think.

July 6, 2012

Let's Help Him Come Up With A Working Solution!

Pulling Together On An Idea
Let's test our leadership skills.  One of the best ways to see how well we lead others is to respectfully jump into a situation and offer some valuable advice that will help a small business owner develop a pattern of solutions that will help his business model make a significant, relevant and worthwhile change.  Can we chime in and do this for him, respectfully?

Let's give it a whirl?

Here's the deal.  I have a male business associate that I met nearly 15 years ago.  He has dabbled with several small business attempts.  He loves technology and has a gift in that field of expertise.  He has an above average understanding of the workings of the industry.  He is self-taught in the work he performs.  He has always wanted to manage his own business model.  He is what I would call a 79%'er.  That means he truly gets about 79% of what needs to be done to successfully operate a growing successful business model.

There are three major components that make up the core of duties that a small business must learn to play very well.  The first component is accounting, the numbers.  The second component is the love, knowledge and marketable understanding of the product.  The third and last component is the successful marketing of the whole business effort.  The successful management of these three components make up the critical duties that help a business model win consistently.

With this in mind, let's examine the challenge this small business owner is facing.  Keep in mind, he is a regular reader of this blog.  Let's remain respectful, please.  There are 21,000 of you blog readers out there right now.  I think it is about time we solicit some of your best practices advice on some of these challenging issues small business is facing.  This is a guy I know can win in business.  He has some very acute skills that are good for making it happen.  The other day I was coming out of my doctors office after a diabetes review and check up on my progress.  He and I crossed paths at that time and chatted in the parking lot about a few things.  Mostly we spent time catching up with each others lives.  I have not had a long conversation with him for several months.  It was good to get caught up.

During that conversation he posed a serious question to me.  He wanted to know if I would be interested in helping him build a new business model he was currently setting up.  He was nine/tenths done with the model set up.  He felt it was time to go out and sell its services to the general public.  He wanted to know what would be the best way to finish the model design and get the word out about the services it will provide.

Isn't this exactly the same challenge we all have on building up our business models?  How do we finalize the package we operate and how do we get the word out about how good it is for the end user to enjoy?  Is that not what all small business owners are trying to do?  I think that is the last and steepest hurdle all of us face.  How do we get this thing going in the best growing direction?  How do we attract consumers to pay what we need them to pay?  How do we get the money thing to work?  How do we get enough consumer activity to help us pay our effort bills and leave us with a little left over money that we can call profits?  Is that not what small business owners do?

I think that is the deal.  That is how all small business challenges work.  We may color the process differently, we may arrange our models to tilt one way or the other, but in the end, this is exactly what we must learn how to do consistently...profit.

Here was what he described he was trying to do in his new business model.  It also led him to ask for my advice on how to do the next steps.

July 5, 2012

Staying Motivated, What's The Trick?

I like the game of golf.  I do not play it very much because it does not fit into my schedule as nicely as I would prefer.  However, I always seem to have fun when I get a chance to go out and play.  Golf is a funny game.  It is one of those sports that the more you play, the more you tend to like it.  The more you tend to like it, the more you want to play it.  Consequently, the more you go out to play it the better you try to become.  The harder you work on improving the game, the more difficult the game seems to become.  The harder you try the harder it gets.  Golf is a funny game.

The world of business management is much the same.  Sometimes it becomes more interesting to do.  The more interesting it becomes the harder you try to make it happen better.  The harder you try the more you discover how truly hard the game of successful business management becomes.  In golf, you discover how important every single joint and muscle movement becomes in how the club eventually meets the ball.  You discover how many multiple ways you can mess up a simple shot.  There are a lot of moving parts that need perfect control at every move to be able to hit the ball correctly and get it to go where you want it to go.  Successful business management is much the same.

The more a business leader works to become better at producing improved profits, the harder it seems to be to make that happen.  The business leader soon discovers how important every little detail about how they lead their business model becomes crucially vital in the eventual production of the outcomes they desire.  It seems like every little thing matters.  Even the tiny little details seem to interfere with how good the outcome arrives.  The game of business leadership soon proves how difficult it really is to consistently produce a profitable pattern of wins.  It is a lot like golfing.  It is not as easy as it looks.

One of the things that occurs as a business leader becomes more involved in the game of business is that they pour everything they do into the improvement of their efforts.  Business leaders become consumed about business.  They look like a serious golfer.  Serious golfers become consumed about the game of golf.  Every golf magazine is examined to find better tips on how to score better.  Every little detail about how to properly improve the putting game is reviewed, studied, tried and practiced.  Every little detail about how to deliver a longer drive consistently is treated the same.  Lessons, shelter magazines on 'how to become a better golfer' and more playing time become like an obsession to a serious golfer.  They begin to eat, sleep and drink the golfing game.  Business leaders become cut from the same kind of cloth.  They become consumed about the details of the business game.  Hence, as the title of this blog suggests...24/7.

That brings up another very important topic.  How does a business leader stay motivated at working to improve what they so badly want to do?  What is the long term trick?  How does a business leader remain motivated enough to become properly consumed about doing what is ultimately necessary to do?  What is the trick?