Management

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Dan Kennedy is one of the many well-known business experts who can often be found saying “Money loves speed”. What they mean is speed of implementation. IE: How fast do you take information and take action on it? The faster, the better, as far as your wallet is concerned.

For example, we talked yesterday about pet peeves.

A few hours later, Bruce Johnson was in the middle of his client base’s online community asking what their pet peeves were with his company.

Some business owners would have printed out the post, tossed it on a pile of todo notes and gotten around to it “someday”. That isn’t what Bruce did.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, someone emailed me and said that the blog looked like crap on Internet Explorer 6 under Windows XP. That long awaited move to WordPress 2.5 simply had to get done, so last night, Business is Personal moved to 2.5 and to a new look and feel (which isn’t quite where I want it…yet).

Every time you look closely at a very successful entrepreneur, you’ll find someone who takes action on information as quickly as possible.

It doesn’t mean they’re always in a hurry (though they might be), it means that they take action. Now. Today.

Not “someday” or “soon”.

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Who hasn’t either had a plumber hanging out of their sink, or heard about one? You know the stereotype.

Some guy’s rear end is hanging out from under your sink, his pants are not quite the right size, and “too much information” is pointed right at you. It’s like looking at a car wreck on the highway. You know you shouldn’t look. You don’t want to see that. But, you look anyway. My eyes, my eyes!

That’s probably one of the most commonly-known consumer pet peeves with the plumbing business.

In your business, no matter what you do or sell, people have pet peeves with your business.

If you’re a builder, the common ones are: communication is poor, workmanship, management of sub-contractors is troubling, rarely on budget, rarely on time, cheap materials that weren’t what was spec’d out.

Note: If you’re a builder, you may not do these things, but I’ll bet you know some builders in your market that DO have these problems. Likewise for the plumbers.

In every single market, there is a common list of pet peeves that consumers have about your business.

We’ve all had that lovely waste of time the “our service person will be there <27 days from now> between noon and 7pm.” That’s what many businesses call a service appointment. I call it a good waste of a day.

What pet peeves does your business inflict on your clients?

Not sure? Ask your clients. Ask friends what ticks them off or annoys them about doing business with businesses like yours. Once you have a list, take steps to eliminate them and put processes in place to prevent their return.

Then take it a step further. Make note of the contrast between you and your competition as it relates to these pet peeves.

For example: “Our service appointments don’t last all afternoon. We’ll be there when we say we will, or we’ll give you $50 and buy you dinner.”

These are easy things to fix, and being the only plumber in town who isn’t putting on a show will make an impact.

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If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you’ll have read a few posts about the value of measurement.

photo credit: Looking Glass

Measuring marketing response is the primary thing you’ll find, but as a CFO friend of mine says, “That which is measured will be managed”.

Seth starts off talking about the green marketing but ends up making a very good point about why those things we measure are better-managed.

Bottom line: They’ve got a number.

Got something that’s important to your business? Keep score. It matters.

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photo credit: Lee Jordan

On last Friday’s radio show, I asked my listeners the rhetorical question: “If your business disappeared, would anyone notice?”

Perhaps a more realistic question: If a “Closed” sign was in the window tomorrow, without warning…would anyone really care?

Or would they simply drive down the street to the next business that does what you do, and go on with their lives?

The ideal answer is that there would be rioting in the streets, but let’s be realistic:)

Would they notice? If they noticed, would they care?

If you can’t answer ‘Yes!’, what do you think makes them stop at your business now, instead of driving a little bit further to someone else’s place?

If the road in front of your business is torn up for the next 3 months due to state road work, would people be determined enough to do business with you that they would deal with the detours and hassles of driving in a construction zone?

This sort of thing happens to restaurants, retail and service businesses all the time. Many close because they aren’t doing enough to make their business a habit for their clients. Or they aren’t being imaginative enough to find a way to deal with the construction.

If the state started working on the road in front of your building and continued to do so for 3 months - what would you do to get prospects to deal with the construction hassles and dust, solely to do business with you?

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Yesterday, we talked about making it easier for your clients to do - whatever it is that you make them do, hopefully not making them do it at all.

But what about making it easier to do the things that you can’t eliminate? One example is making it easier to reorder from you. You already know what your clients buy, right?

What do you do to remind them it’s time to refill, replenish and reorder? Since you know what they ordered, it should be easy for you to do this.

How do you know? It’s in your order database, point of sale (POS) system or online store order history.

You know how long it has been since they’ve visited your store or ordered online.

Is that number of days getting close? Shouldn’t you send them something (or call) to make it easy to order?

Has that number of days already passed? Shouldn’t you be contacting them to make sure all is well and that they haven’t run out of whatever they buy from you?

Do you have a system in place to get regular reorders pre-authorized by your clients? Makes life easier for them and more fruitful for you.

If you have automated reorders in place, isn’t it that much harder for a competitor to steal your clients from you? And aren’t your clients that much happier with the way you’ve added a little non-stick Teflon to their day to day lives?

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While I never met Bruce Barrington, one of the reasons I really admire him is something he said long ago about the things that programming tools make you do when building a program.

Bruce said:

Anything you have to do every time shouldn’t have to be done at all.

photo credit: babasteve

Frankly, I think you can apply this to a lot of things in business - at least systems and processes-wise.

Here’s an example: Last Friday, I’m logging into Aweber to add a new message to my email newsletter. At the bottom of the list, I notice that my last message had a SpamAssassin score of 0.4.

Call me anal-retentive (or fastidious, whatever) but I don’t like seeing those scores on my emails.

Not. Even. Zero. Point. One.

So I click the SpamAssassin score link, which is supposed to show me which parts of the message caused the score to result. When I click the link, Aweber’s system tells me this:

There was an error in processing your SpamAssassin score. This is usually due to the message having lines that are greater than 80 characters long. If you still get this error message, then please contact customer support.

Tell me this.

Why in the world do I need to contact customer support? If you’re aweber (whose service I really like), wouldn’t you want to know *every single time* that this problem occurs?

Assuming that’s true, they already know who they are and how to contact themselves<g> and they already know who I am, since I’m logged into Aweber and working on my emails. So why don’t they have their system automatically open a support case on this issue?

I simply shouldn’t have to do this manually.
What do you make your clients do every day, every time they do business with you, every time they use your product, service, software or what not…that they shouldn’t have to do?

Fix it. Get started today.

It’ll make your clients appreciate you more because you’re saving their time.

It’ll make your business stronger and more productive because your stuff will have that much more value, and it’ll be easier to use.

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They could have sulked.

They could have sued.

They could have said “No comment.”

They could have done absolutely nothing, and likely would have paid the price quietly, possibly for years with some customers.

photo credit: Sonnett

Instead Cleveland-area Papa John’s offered 23 cent pizzas as a way of making amends for the unauthorized production of a t-shirt calling Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James a crybaby. James’ uniform number is 23, thus the price of the pizzas.

The unauthorized Crybaby t-shirts with LeBron’s number were made by a Washington DC franchisee. While that franchisee might be getting grilled in private, their mistake was turned into a positive by the way that Cleveland Papa John’s handled the flap.

All Papa John’s locations in the Cleveland area, Columbus, Toledo and Youngstown will offer the discount pies today from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The lesson for small business owners: How you recover from mistakes and bad news is often more important than the bad news or mistake itself.

Update: Want to put some numbers on it? Google papa john 23 cent pizza. You’ll find 64,300 search engine results in Google on that search phrase. UPI. AP. ChicagoTribune.com, Cleveland.com and on and on. Most of it positive PR for how they handled the situation. Hear more on the Papa Johns LeBron Crybaby story on my May 9 Hotseat Radio show.

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Sometimes the edge between success and floundering is quite small.

At 211 degrees F, water doesn’t boil at sea level. At 212 degrees F, it does. It’s that way in business as well.

By now, you’ve heard the story about the Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, a former economics professor in Bangladesh. He provided microloans to entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. Doesnt sound like that big of a deal….UNTIL you know the details.

photo credit: dsasso

In 1974, he was visiting a small native village and after talking to one of the villagers, discovered they made and sold bamboo stools for a living. Problem was, they had to borrow in order to buy their daily supply of bamboo.

The loan amount? About US$0.25. Yep, a quarter. Unfortunately, almost none of them had a quarter. With their small daily profit and tiny loan amounts, no bank would consider a loan to them.

Instead, they had to borrow from the US equivalent of “loan sharks”, who charged extremely high interest, resulting in debts the village businesspeople were unable to pay off.

With the debt the villagers were carrying, they were stuck in financial quicksand. Unable to make progress, and unable to borrow from normal sources in order to help themselves out of their situation.

Yunus started asking around and found that the total debt for the entire village was $27.

$27. Now *that’s* a slight edge.

Everyone reading this likely has $27 in their wallet or purse and thinks little of it. To these villagers, it may as well have been $27000 or 27 million - because they didn’t have it.

As you might have guessed, Yunus paid off their debt out of his pocket, enabling the entrepreneurs to turn their situation positive, generate a profit and pay him back.

That small act created microcredit…which was the basis of his Nobel Prize.

Little things do make a difference, and that’s the whole principle behind the slight edge.

What’s the little thing keeping your business from boiling?

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Since I work out of a home office, I don’t spend all that much time on the road. Good thing.

As a result, I don’t have to fill up the Suburban too often. It’s great for hauling around a big pile of Scouts and their camping gear, but lousy at efficient travel for me and the Dog (my Mom the English teacher cringes, thinking “it should be the ‘dog and I’ “).

photo credit: kevindooley

So last Friday, I fill it up for the first time in a little over a week. Gas has risen about 15 cents per gallon since the last time I filled up (8 days ago), and a total of at least 27 cents since the time before that. Result: We’re at $3.43 here as of 10pm Friday night.

Anyhow, I’m on fumes after picking up my son after an all day (and much of the night) District band competition (he plays sax), so I stop and fill ‘er up.

$143.80 - a new record for the blue beast, who has a 40 gallon belly.

On the way home, I’m thinking to myself “Thank goodness I don’t have a long commute like I did 20 years ago.”

Then I start thinking about what changes in customer behavior this is causing - and more importantly, what actions businesses should take in order to deal with possible changes in behavior.

• Do pizza delivery services get busier?
• Do delivery charges rise?
• Fedex fuel charges go up.
• Food climbs 40% in the last 6 months.

With all this stuff going on, what are you doing to compensate for the changes in your customers’ behavior?

Remember the posts over the last week or so about automation? Twitter? Your website? All of these things will be more valuable as people decide not to drive all over town to shop, but instead, decide to pick up the phone or open up their browser.

Today, I picked up the phone and asked if 2 print jobs were done. The print shop is a 45 minute roundtrip drive on a good day. I drive in to pick up the work - and only 1 job is done. When I got there - as is usual - they have to search all over the shop to find the printed output (I’ve watched this for 2-3 years and still haven’t figured out why they insist on doing it that way).

So I will have to go into town again on Monday and get the other job - all because someone made a mistake. While it was an honest mistake, it cost me 45 minutes and about 3 gallons of gas.

Look at what happened to me and examine your business to see how you can streamline processes, delivery and so on - all in the interest of saving you and your client some time, money and energy. The more efficient you make the process of doing business with you, the more value you provide to your clients and the better off your business will be.

Ask yourself these questions, as examples:

• How can I save my customer a trip to the store/office?
• How can I save my customer some time?
• What can I automate that we do manually now (taking up time)?
• What can I automate that isn’t being done at all, but would provide more value to my clients?

For example, it would be simple to setup an automated notification system that would email, fax, SMS/text message or Twitter me when the print jobs are really done. I would expect a notification for each one.

Likewise, delivery would save me time and money. Do you offer it? I’m far more concerned about the extra 45 minutes than the $10. Clearly, I can justify at least a $10 delivery fee, since it’ll cost me that much in fuel alone. With the capabilities of route generation software, you can deliver 20-30-40 packages each day and not spend all your time on the road. You can use local courier services as well.

When will $143.80 change the behavior of your customer - and will you be prepared to provide them with business as usual, only better?

PS: Don’t confuse efficient with cheap.

Related posts elsewhere on the net:

Improving Operational Efficiency and Business Performance in …
Social Media for Efficiency and Productivity in Business
Screwing Over Customers is Not a Good Business Strategy

On Monday, the Albany Business Journal joined the bandwagon saying that a Federal fuel tax “vacation” would help. I say it’s a pile of horse biscuits. An 18.4 cent discount doesn’t mean much when fuel has gone up 30+ cents in 10 days. And it doesnt fix the problem, it just panders to the voters.

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photo credit: keela84

Today’s guest post is from Seth Godin, who as usual, hits the nail on the head about how to deliver quality to your clients - while talking about the Pope’s visit to your place of business. Or not.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/the-pope-is-com.html

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