Too Conservative, Too Stingy.

Do Not Look Like You Are Closing For Business

We all go through some interesting cycles in our business careers.  We develop some interesting patterns in how we operate from time to time.  I am not sure that every time we go through a new pattern of operating that we produce the best results.  I know in my career, some of my patterns of change did not turn out as well as my business preferred.  Some of the cycles of change I introduced in my life of business leadership did not necessarily turn out so well.  At the time I was in those cycles, I could not see how bad the pattern interrupted and eventually damaged the good flow of business activities.  I was blind to the ways my cycle of changes had done the damage they did.

I recall one of those not-so-good cycles.  There was a period of time when I became very conservative in how I lead my business operations.  Conservative methods are not necessarily a wrong way to operate, however.  I prefer to recommend some conservatism in many functions that help a business model become more responsible, especially in accounting.  Unfortunately, I went through a period of time when I became too extreme with my conservative ways.  I became too conservative.

I would pinch every penny, watch every penny and count every penny.  I become so obsessed with my conservative attitudes that I become rather stingy about my business money and my business time.  I went across the line of responsible conservatism.  I became a nasty little miser.  I got too stingy.

When I think back at my stingy ways I see some things that really hurt my business model.  The things I see now that hurt my business back then were not evident to me back then.  I was blind to the damage they were doing.  I did not know what I could not see.  In retrospect, I now see exactly where the most damage was done.  It is too bad that my ego and my over-confidence was not in better check back then.  Those characteristics hurt my business growth.  What's more, I protected them with all of my might.  Nobody could tell me anything different.  Not back then.

I sometimes wonder how many business leaders are reading this blog and operating in that kind of mode?  I know it can happen.  I did it comfortably.  I practiced wrong thoughts, wrong methods and strongly supported them.  Nobody could tell me anything different.  Not back then.

We all go through some interesting cycles in our business careers.  We stand on wrong doings as if we have reached the top of the hill.  We practice wrong stuff, wrong thoughts and wrong doings.  We are proud of doing those wrong things because we truly do not see how wrong they are.  We protect them with all of our might.  I know, I am guilty.

One of  the most damaging things that can come with too much conservatism is that we can grow into becoming too stingy.  Often times when we go over-board with our conservative ways we develop a rather stingy attitude about money and ideas.  I have not found that either of these characteristics is such a good idea to practice in a business leadership role.  They can create more growth damage than the business deserves.  I highly recommend that if you are one of those business leaders who operates with a high degree of conservatism, check your stingy pulse more often.  In fact, find someone who is not afraid to tell you the truth and ask them if you operate with a certain degree of stinginess.  Make sure it is someone who is not afraid to hurt your feelings.  Maybe you could ask your spouse.  They are often the best ones for telling the truth.

Stingy methods can limit future growth.  Stingy methods can cripple creativity.  Stingy methods can promote stingy employee behaviors.  Stingy methods can ruin the laws of compensation that can quietly work invisibly against your business efforts to succeed.  Stingy methods burn up valuable resources.  It robs your business of hidden support from all of the players you need to engage.  Stingy methods curb your potential to develop a good sense of character.  Stinginess does not often come from careless and reckless business methods.  It usually is found under the covers near the more conservative strains of business leadership.  If you are somewhat conservative in your business leadership, look honestly for the signs of stinginess.  It might be happening to your business model under the covers.  Take a serious peak to see if you have some happening.  We need to clean it up if it is happening.

Being too conservative with the cycle of business leadership can become converted to an unwanted high level of stingy ways.  It can happen to the best operators.  It can also happen without notice.  It can come strong to play without the business leader recognizing that it has arrived and taken over.  Be careful of stingy methods if you operate your leadership from a more conservative stance.  Some unwanted business damage may be happening right now, without your awareness.  We can become too conservative and therefore too stingy in our cycle of business leadership.  Our business model will suffer.

How do we detect this little effect?

Winning Is Unnatural, Try It And See For Yourself!

How Do You Know What You Do Not Know?

There has not been a business leader that I have met in my 40 year career that did not at one time believe they were naturally made for running a business.  Furthermore, most of them also believed they would win naturally. Not one of them went into business for themselves to lose at business.  They all thought they had what it takes to win doing what they thought they were meant to do.  All of them thought they knew how to win running a business.

I have never met a single business owner who did not think they already knew how to win at business.  Unfortunately, most of them lose.  Very few of them win.  That is what the real financial numbers tell us.  That is what the data supports.  Most business owners lose at the financial game of owning a small business.  Even a tougher reality remains.  Very few business owners produce upper middle class incomes.  Very few.  Those are the realities of owning a small business.  That is what the real honest data tells us.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.  The data supports this assumption.

What is natural on this subject is that most business owners will easily deny that they are some of the ones who lose at the business game.  Denial is natural.  That truth is also very common.

The truth is never really easy to accept.  Some people are good at seeing and accepting the truth when it is not so friendly.  Most people are not good at it.  Unfriendly truths are more likely to be swept under the rug.  Most people avoid them at all costs.  Some of the best business leaders do this kind of dodging of the truth more than they should.  The more they dodge the truth the more it hurts their business performance.  I have seen many business leaders do this kind of pattern and operate for years in the pain of never really winning big.  You can lose in business year after year and never really get it right.  This kind of pattern can be practiced and tolerated for a very long time.  I am watching many business leaders I personally know right now do this very exact thing.  They are leading their models into some unwanted losses and they will not win much more than what they already have won until they change the way they operate what they do.  They remain doing what they naturally believe they should be doing.  They do not yet understand that winning in business is an unnatural act.  As a result, they will continue to hold on to the natural things they feel they need to do.  They will keep on losing.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.

If you are a business leader and your results have not yet produced some handsome rewards, your business model may be one of those models that needs to shift how it does what it does.  You may need to change the way you lead the business model you control.  You may need to begin doing some unnatural things.  You might need to learn how to do some things you are not naturally wired to do.  Your victories, your business model and your future success may be waiting on you to make some unnatural changes.  You might be the kind of business leader who does not understand how profound this kind of thinking truly is.  You might be the type of business leader who would rather gloss over the truth and avoid making some unnatural changes in how you function when you lead your business model.  If so, keep up the natural stuff.  Just get used to losing more often.

Winning is unnatural.  It is an unnatural act.  If you are not pushing yourself to do unnatural things in your leadership ways, you may be one of those people leading a losing business model.  Nobody naturally gets lucky and wins consistently.  Nobody wins consistently doing natural things.  Accept it and move on.

Winning is unnatural, try it and see for yourself.

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?

Why Do We Fail? Because Success Is Boring.

Bill Gates wrote a pretty good book a few years ago, "Business At The Speed Of Thought".  There were some segments from that book that were quite good and other segments that were not very good.  However, the segments that were quite good were not only quite good, they were magically dead on.  Unfortunately, most people run through their lives operating less than magically dead on.  This is especially true of business leaders.

Most business leaders run their duties through the daily process, missing most of the dead on stuff...all day long, every single day.  They get up each morning, do today much of what they did yesterday.  They run so close to their daily habits that they operate without zest, without added flashes of excitement and manage their way through a muddled process of leading their business models to a normal level of performance.  That is exactly how most business leaders work their models every single day.  They function in an average world with average results.  They often struggle to get their business model 'over-the-hump' of its debt-ridden ways.  They seem to be overwhelmed with sudden problems that plague their plans to make better things happen.  They do not win as often as they would like to.  Sound familiar?  Welcome to average.

One of the brilliant segments that Bill wrote about in that book was the idea of learning how to manage your business leadership with a certain flair for continued disturbance.  He called it, "bad news must travel fast."  It is a little bit like keeping everything each day a little bit off-kilter, kind of on purpose.  Not off-kilter for the sake of pseudo control, but off-kilter for the sake of seeing better.  Not off-kilter for the sake of performing divide and conquer techniques, but off-kilter for the sake of fostering employee initiative and knowledge sharing.  These segments of that book were written brilliantly.  Go read them.

I once had a very strong business mentor.  He had many one liners that became part of his trademark.  One of those one liners was this, "Well...what are you waiting for?"  Every time he made a suggestion it was not given to continue on as part of some long conversation.  It was given to me to go do.  When he would say I needed to go read something, he would look at me and say, "Well, what are you waiting for?"  If I sat there waiting to have more conversation with him he might also say this, "Don't waste my time...I am telling you to go get some information I recognize you need.  Why are you still sitting there?  You do not know what you need to know.  You have an information gap holding your success back.  Go get that information gap solved.  Then we will move on to the rest of this lesson."

Bill Gates wrote about some stuff that fits well in today's employment marketplace very nicely.  We are there.  This economy has become the breeding ground for the most brilliant business leaders to flourish well.  Here's why.  Tons upon tons of business leaders are dry, uninformed, egotistical wanna be's that are spending way too much time living in the past.  They are spending way too much time pouring over financials long before they spend any time on the library of customer complaints they can be easily caught trying to avoid hearing.  Markets of today are way too fickle to provide any measure of success to this kind of business leader.  End of seminar.  Go read Bill's perspective on this subject.  The link is given freely to you above in this post.  There is no excuse for missing this kind of work.  What are you waiting for?

Why do we fail?  That should be the prime question of the business world today.  Business leaders should work harder on discovering why their models are not performing well.  What's more, they should approach that question as if they have no answers pre-determined.  A great business leader would approach that question without knowing any answers as to how they would respond in describing why they are suffering so badly.  Unfortunately, too many business leaders already believe they have the answers as to why they are suffering so badly.  I read that last sentence and it makes sense...even as it makes no sense.  Let's figure this stuff out.  Let's quit pretending we know why we are suffering.  Let's get to some real work on finding where we are truly weak and begin fixing it.  Let's wake up and become accountable for our reasoning and our efforts to improve.  Let's find out what success requires and start doing those things more often.  I am pretty sure this will not be some friendly work, however.

Being Strange Is Not Always Wrong

Too Weird Is Not Marketable Enough

There is nothing wrong with being strange.  There is nothing wrong with being unique.  There is nothing wrong with being weird.  Unique and weird sells well in most marketplaces.  Unique is good.  Weird is good but too weird is too much, however.  There is a line that is drawn by the consumer.  They will love to participate in unique methods of operations.  They will also participate in weird marketing up to a point.  Once that level of weirdness has been reached, no more.  The consumer will exit and they will exit fast.

The mass market is where you want to be.  You want your business model to service the critical mass.  That is where the lions share of the market lives.  Be courageous enough to attract that market but do it in your unique way.  Find out how to paint your model into a pattern of operations that will attract the masses but in your unique way.

One more thing, you also need to separate yourself away from all of your competition.  You will need to learn how to stand out among the crowd of competitors.  That is why uniqueness is so important.  That is also why being a bit weird is not always a bad thing to be when you are trying to stand out in the sea of competition.  I like to advise that a business model become creative enough to almost reach the edge of weirdness.  I like to operate my models next to that edge.  It attracts some nice attention.  Moving a bit closer to a simple level of consistent weirdness is an easy way to become more unique.  It will help your business model become more recognizable.  When you are recognizable, your business model has a better chance to attract more people.

I try to mentally manage my effort to this type of marketing in a numbered fashion.  I like to keep my models a bit strange, a little bit different than all of the others.  I always spend time to check out the other competitors but I will try to remain slightly away from the main stuff that they do.  I might develop a little weirdness that can be added to my marketing ways.  I like to suggest that other business models do the same kind of thing.  Learn how to become a little bit of an artist.  Learn how to paint your marketing ways like a singer would develop their own sound.  When you hear Elton John sing, you know it is Elton John.  When you hear Michael Jackson's music you know it is Michael singing.  When you hear a Johnny Cash song you know it is Johnny Cash.  When you hear Elvis Presley sing, you know who is singing.  They made their trademark ways recognizable.  They market themselves well in this fashion.

Many new singers do not do this kind of marketing quite as well.  That is why many of the new performers get lost in the sea of singing competitors.  We do not immediately recognize them.  We cannot take possession of knowing them.  We cannot easily become their best supporters.  We cannot easily become included in their efforts to develop a wave of popularity.  It makes it difficult for us to belong.  All we want to do is belong.  As consumers, we need to be able to recognize who we want to support.  We need to recognize where we want to belong.

This is simple stuff to discuss but much harder to achieve.  I like to work closer to the side of weirdness to make this kind of marketing process happen more easily.  Maybe we should open up the doors of strangeness just a little bit more than we might usually do.  Maybe we should experiment with trying out some weirdness ways.  Let's keep that weirdness marketing effort somewhere around 20% of what we do.  Let's market this level of weirdness in a numbered fashion.  Let's suggest that we become 20% weird.  Let's make that numbered effort to include the level of weirdness and the volume of weirdness.  These are two completely different registers to monitor.  The level of weirdness refers to the depth of the actions.  The volume of weirdness refers to how often you repeat those actions.  These are two completely different things.

If weird words are used, let's make sure they are only 20% weird.  For example...sycloeoptomy is a weird word.  But so is sycophantic.  Sycophantic is not quite as weird.  It is only 20% weird.  Go with the 20% weird versions of what you plan to market.  Do not go all of the way weird.  It is too much for any market to absorb.  You will scare them all away.  You want to attract the masses, not scare away the multiples.  become unique to a point.  Stay closer to the 20% edge.  Do some weird stuff, but not too much.  Keep your feet on the ground and stay mostly normal.  Edgy is not wrong marketing, to a point.  Remain level on this effort.  Elton John had those interesting sun shade glasses and strange outfits.  Elvis did his hip movements, hair flip and smirk-like smile.  Michael had his glove and Johnny Cash was always seen in black!  They had their strange quirkiness embedded into their marketing ways.  Become comfortable with doing about 20% of this kind of work in your marketing ways.  Develop some set of strange trademarks that can become recognized by your customers.  It is not wrong to perform marketing in this fashion.

Let's look at the depth of the level of weirdness you plan to employ.

Tolerance Is A Virtue

Only You Need To Lead The Way!

Sometimes business explodes, sometimes it flattens out.  These are things that happen to all business leaders.  In baseball, we call a slow down a slump.  Sometimes hitters get into a slump.  For whatever reason they cannot seem to buy a hit during their slump.  They begin trying all kinds of extra things, twists, adjustments and modifications to their batting swing to try and get out of their hitting slump.  Sometimes it does not matter how hard they try.  The slump remains.  That is just how it goes once in awhile.  Then, as if by magic the slump disappears.  They beginning hitting the ball well again.  The slump is over.  Business leaders witness this very same thing.  They get into a business slump once in awhile.

Who knows where these slumps come from but they are real.  They do appear once in awhile.  They come into the play of every business model.  Sooner or later a slump comes to life.  Sales volume slows, problems seem to increase, needs spread out and challenges mount up.  Slumps in business often show up when we least expect them to appear.  They come when they seem to be the least needed.  I cannot think of any good time to have a business slump, but most of the business slumps I have witnessed have appeared during times when my business model could least afford them.  Business slumps seem to appear when the cash flow was the lowest.  This is a very trying thing to manage.

How do the leaders of business deal with this kind of challenge?  How do we bring our business model out of a business slump?  Can the leaders do anything to help relieve the slump of its control?  I have watched great baseball players try almost everything to get out of a hitting slump, and fail.  I have witnessed great business leaders do the very same thing.  They try everything to get out of the business slump their business model is experiencing.  Nothing seems to work well.  I have witnessed this effect and have lived through it several times in my business career.  Sometimes the slump wins.  Sometimes it finds a way to stick around for awhile.  No business magic seems to help get rid of it.  Try everything under the kitchen sink and the slump seems to still persist.  I have seen this effect happen.  Some of you business leaders might be right in the middle of a terrible slump right now.  It happens.

First of all, recognize that business slumps happen.  They do appear once in awhile and sometimes they appear without warning.  All of the sudden, the sales and customers disappear.  The sales activities become slow and slower.  The volume dries up and the revenues slow down.  The bills seem to increase during these periods of time.  The costs seem to mount up larger than normal during a business slump.  The relationships among the staff seem to tighten up during a business slump.  Personnel turf battles seem to come out of the closets during a business slump.  Common challenges seem much taller during a business slump.  Anxiety and stress seem to increase during a business slump.  Simple stuff becomes hard to do.  Business slumps do not play fair.

There are three things that every business owner should do when they notice a business slump has arrived.  First of all, do not worry about them.  Do not become too wrapped up with the components of unknowns at the first sight of their appearance.  Stay cool and calm as the business slump raises it head.  Second of all, get busy with determining what may have caused the slump.  Begin searching for logical and truthful business patterns that could be contributing to the growing slump.  Try not to avoid investigating some of the things you may have changed.  Be strong enough to ask your customers, your staff and your associates the effective questions you need to ask to determine where the best repairs can take place.  Do not try to pretend you know the solutions.  You are in a slump because you did not see it coming.  That is easy to see that you did not know what to do to prevent it.  You cannot pretend you way out of a slump.  And finally, begin working on some things that will help your business model improve the down turn of this slump.  Start making some real adjustments.  Become smart, respectful and effective with the business choices you make.

These three things will help you find your way back out of a business slump...do not worry, investigate why and begin treatment.  This is what a good business leader will do.  They will remain calm, find out what needs to be effectively done and start making the right kinds of necessary changes.  They will begin their work to eliminate the size and length of a business slump.  Oh, by the way, one more thing I might add...all of these efforts may not actually work!