photo credit: Ed Siasoco (aka SC Fiasco)

On NPR not long ago, the Postmaster General spoke about the US Postal Service’s financial situation.

At the close of the interview, the Postmaster made a point of saying that he doesn’t pay any bills online, noting that it wouldn’t be right for him to do so. I suspect he probably feels that it wouldn’t be right if he used FedEx or UPS.

In fact, the truth is just the opposite.

Using these services would help him understand his competition’s offerings from a consumer perspective, and see where his agency is lacking, both in service and in their offerings.

If you aren’t at least familiar with the customer experience of a product/service that is taking you to the cleaners, you’re unlikely to understand what the attraction is much less the weaknesses and potential new opportunity ideas they might give you.

Even if you plan to stick with your current product, it will help you see new competitive angles, perhaps even new markets.

You aren’t likely to find all innovation within yourself. You also won’t find it all by studying your competition’s offerings, but it is worth the time to study the things customers have left you for – if you expect to get your mojo back.

photo credit: Luz Adriana Villa A.

A question came in earlier this month… “How do I compete with businesses that can offer similar products/services at a lower cost?”

The question is “Why are you depending on price to close your sales?”

It’s important to examine because *so many* people focus on it. In a weak economy, it’s natural for price pressures to be everywhere. Did you choose to compete on price, or did it sneak up on you?

If price is your edge, it should be an intentional, strategic choice. All else being equal, price will be the natural decision maker since buyer won’t have to sacrifice based on price.

The trouble is, all else is seldom equal.

Wiggling

In product sales, a competitor’s prices are usually lower because they sell more and can get better pricing from their suppliers. If supply costs are the issue, that’s something you can fix as your sales volume increases.

Until you get there, find some wiggle room. You may find that it makes price less important or even takes it off the table.

Wiggle?

There’s almost always some wiggle room in a price-sensitive situation for the underdog who is hungry enough to do more (ie: provide more value) than the “low price leader”. Remember, they’re the one totally focused on price and their entire business is built around it (think “WalMart”). Want to compete with WallyWorld on price? Only if you’re crazy.

Is price *really* the only way you compete with your competition? Not in my experience.

Whether you sell products or services, there are certainly those who shop solely on price, but there are always others who want more and don’t mind paying a little more for it.

Are there no other ways that you can add value to these products and services? Have you asked your customers?

Take some time to listen to your customers. I’m confident that if you listen, you’ll find a way to take the focus off price and put it on things that will matter a week or a month from now, when price is far less important.

Let’s talk about an example, something price sensitive and seemingly generic…like carpet cleaning.

Being seldom equal

I could call a dozen carpet cleaners who will do two bedrooms and a hall for $79 (or whatever). Maybe one or two of them would do a good enough job to earn a call back, even though I suspect all of them would do a good job when it came to cleaning the carpet.

Maybe your carpet cleaning skills are only 2% better than everyone else’s, or maybe they’re a little worse (yes, you need to work on that). It matters, but it isn’t necessarily what people highly value when they get this work done.

Your job is to be their carpet cleaner. The name that comes to mind when someone mentions a dirty carpet or that they need to get theirs done.

Not because you’re the one who happened to do it yesterday, but because you’re the only one they’d dream of calling after the way you handled it last time (and the time before, and the time before). You’re the one they talk about at church, in the aisle at the grocery store, at lunch the next day, on the golf course.

Your name comes up at all of those places because you did things no one else ever has and you did things in a way that no one else ever has. The next morning, they’re still reeling from the experience.

An experience? It can be. They may live in a tiny bungalow or a 12,000 square foot mansion. Either way, you can design and deliver a consistent end-to-end experience that they just can’t forget and can’t stop telling their friends about. Ask “What else can we do?”

Rethink your pricing

Despite improving what you deliver, it’s still worth putting thought into your pricing.

Companies often price their goods based on cost, the needs of their sales people, their catalog or their e-commerce store rather than in a way that attracts customers.

Your wholesale costs can’t be ignored, but you can restructure your pricing in conjunction with increased value and change the rules of the game.

photo credit: m.a.x

Productivity is pretty important, but it had better apply to the right sort of work.

Even if your employees are incredibly efficient at whatever they do, if their work no longer brings substantial value to the table, your business could evaporate.

The failure to automate the work that can and should be automated will eventually push your costs out of line with the competition. If some of the work you do now could be automated without losing quality, you have to take an honest look at it.

Remember…If you don’t address this issue, the marketplace will do it for you.

If you’ve ever had to lay someone off, you know it isn’t fun. When they walk out for the last time, they have to go home and tell their family and they have to figure out what’s next. It won’t feel any better that it happened because you weren’t paying attention – and it certainly won’t help you to be understaffed.

In order to avoid this, you have to look for places to become more efficient. It has to be done without losing quality, distinction or value. It’s possible that your choice becomes your new edge and that the staffer who was doing the low value work ends up managing the process that replaced their labor.

Are you still doing the right things?

Sometimes, automation isn’t enough. You realize (or the market tells you) that you’re doing the wrong work.

Every month, you have to ask yourself about your business and about your people, “Am I doing the right sort of work? If not, am I ready to? If not, what do I have to do to get there?”

If your work can be outsourced easily, you’re living on borrowed time.

If you’re a middleman adding zero value, you’re living on borrowed time.

You already know this if you’re paying attention and being honest with yourself. Even so, it’s nothing to be ashamed of unless you ignore it. Everyone faces market challenges but we don’t have to seek them out and invite them in for dinner.

There’s nothing that says you have to do what you do now, that your people can’t learn a new skill that someone places a high value these days or that your business can’t start making something that people will line up to buy.

The kind of work you should be seeking is the kind of work that produces real value and/or requires taking real responsibility for what you deliver.

Think about the vendors who serve your business. How many of them take real responsibility for the products and services they provide? Now consider the vendor you’d NEVER fire. You know why. They care as much as you do.

What if you don’t want to change?

“Boy, the way Glenn Miller played”…

Edith and Archie sang that song in the 70s about music from decades earlier, looking back upon what they saw as their golden years.

No matter how wonderful those golden years were, no matter what decade they were in, now isn’t then. Even in 1939, the handwriting was on the wall for Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.

If you warmly recall that time two, three or even four decades ago when your area had low unemployment, the best jobs, more work than you could do and close to the highest per capita wages in the country.

Those decades are long gone. So are many of the high-paying jobs that were valued back then. Just like that steam shovel.

Everyone deals with it.

Many “middle class” jobs of a century ago (like coal and ice delivery) were steady jobs. They’re gone. It’s not much different with many of the jobs from 20-30-40 years ago.

If this describes your business, understand that I’m not trying to make light of that. I was trained as a programmer. 20 years later, tens of millions of people in India, the Ukraine, China and elsewhere can do what most “first world” programmers do for $10-20 an hour. I understand the competitive pressures.

If your work can be outsourced at $10-20 an hour, you have to ask yourself…”How much value do I really deliver?”

Take charge. Do the right work.

photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

Recently, Borders book stores reported that they were closing their remaining 399 stores, including our local store here in Kalispell, Montana.

The store has about three months, enough time to liquidate their existing stock.

Survival of the fittest demands that some prosper, some get by and some die. Borders was not one of the fittest booksellers around, and few businesses have a chance of getting up after taking a one-two punch from Amazon and Apple.

Still, there are takeaways for the rest of us.

Homemade Apple Pie?

When you go to an online store, you KNOW when they’ve just tossed up a store so they can say they have one, kind of like how your mom knows when a local restaurant makes their own apple pie or serves a food service vendor pie.

In one case, it’s a labor of love. In the other, it seems like it’s just there because it has to be.

It’s not unlike Borders’ technology, eCommerce and eBook efforts. Once they got around to it, they served food service pie.

Who to blame?

They can’t blame Napster and peer-to-peer sharing. The music business can try, but you don’t see music acts starving. The same can’t be said for their the stuck-in-the-50-60-70s music management houses. Ask a Canadian or European about online music listening from US-based services. You won’t hear many kind words. Inertia and lack of vision killed many of them and took the local music store down with them. Napster was simply the messenger and peer-to-peer the medium. There’s no equivalent in the book business.

They can’t blame their store staff. In the Borders stores I’ve visited, the staff is well-trained and eager to help. Maybe reading fans self-select as Borders job applicants. Regardless of how their stores found their front-line employees, I can’t think of one who wasn’t helpful, knowledgeable etc. I can’t ever remember being tempted to write about them due to bizarre or off-kilter treatment there.

They can’t blame Amazon or Apple. Sure, they can point to the Kindle, the iPad, the Amazon and iBook store (and these two behemoth companies) as what killed them, but blame? Nope. Amazon and Apple offered a great example, partnering opportunities and millions of potential buyers.

Meanwhile, how many of your friends have a Kobo reader? Did you know Borders has an iPhone reader for their Kobo ebooks? Both are food service apple pie. When you’re competing with the likes of Kindle and iPad, you have to be easier, better or cheaper.

They CAN blame C-level management. Certainly Amazon and Apple were a major challenge, but without strategic vision and execution speed, the results were obvious and inevitable. As the Inc. article notes, they had a weak online retail presence and addressed technology change as if it was a chore, not a differentiator.

Management and strategic direction just happens to be your job. How are you addressing those two things?

Serve homemade pie

You may not have to worry about Amazon or Apple, but that doesn’t mean you have nothing to worry about.

Many independent bookstores have failed in the shadow of Barnes and Noble, Borders (and later, Amazon and Apple). But NOT all of them. What makes those stores different? Why are they “immune”? The reality is, they weren’t and still aren’t immune.

The survivors didn’t stare at the door, wondering why more people aren’t randomly deciding to enter their store. They did something about it. They transformed their businesses into one that Amazon or the Apple iBook store will never be: A specialty store delivering amazing personalized service while delivering a product few others will “trouble themselves” with, within the bounds of a business plan that is designed to survive an Amazon/Apple book selling world.

Each one of them uses their online presence as a strategic advantage.

Even if you sell tractors, chainsaws and weed whackers, people are going to search online for info about you and your products. If your online presence offers them the equivalent of the food service apple pie, their next purchase might be at Chainsaws.Amazon.com.

Does your business leverage technology, or use it only when forced to?

Serve homemade apple pie.

photo credit: timlewisnm

In almost every market, there’s someone who seemingly owns that market’s customers and prospects.

They’re the household name in that marketplace.

A common assumption is that they get so many customers that they may as well get them all.

To be sure, doing things that make you that household name is something I strongly encourage you to do. So what do you do if the market you want to enter already has a household name?

You’ve heard me suggest that you: Do more. Do it better. Do it more often. Do it differently.

The owner never has 100% of the market. If it’s a market you’re truly interested in, you need to figure out if there is enough left to make a business of it.

“Enough to make a business of it” has to last at least long enough to get a foothold so you can start to chip away at the leader and/or create new markets for what you do.

Can’t Get No…

For example, every single market includes customers who are dissatisfied.

They might not be that way because the market leader treated them poorly or failed to meet their expectations – though that’s certainly possible.

Every market has people who aren’t aware of the market “owner”, people who will intentionally choose someone other than the market leader just because that business is the leader, people who want something more/better/faster than what the leader does, people who want something different, people who have had a run in with the leader, and so on.

No matter what the reason is that you have them, the expectations thing is a big deal.

In the absence of someone setting expectations for them, people assume their personal expectations will be met – at whatever level they have them. Failing to set expectations almost guarantees dissatisfaction among some portion of the population you serve because their assumptions will be higher than yours.

Different levels are OK. Disappointment is not.

Because you’ll find different levels of expectations, you have an opportunity to create good, better, best, unbelievable, and rock-star class tiers of products and services. Still, your job is to set those expectations as appropriate so that even the lowest tier of service gets *at the very least* exactly what they expect.

How often do you get *exactly what you expect* from a business?

Think hard about that.

Now the hard question: How often do your customers get exactly what they expect from your business?

photo credit: Navicore

Superman was touted as being “faster than a locomotive”.

Locomotives move at a speed people can comprehend. It’s an easy to understand expectation.

He didn’t have to be faster than a plane or a bullet in order to be Super. He just had to be faster than any man.

He didn’t have to leap the tallest building, just tall ones. Really, any building would do, since no one else was leaping over buildings.

Superman seemingly owned the market for folks looking for a superhero.

Yet Spiderman, the Green Hornet, Wonder Woman, Flash and many others somehow managed to find work.

Don’t let Superman scare you out of a market that has plenty of work available.

photo credit: geoftheref

Are you indispensable to your customers?

I was thinking about this earlier this morning, started this post and got sidetracked by “real work”.

Apparently, it was destined to stay on my mind because a couple of hours later, Hugh’s email newsletter sent me this, which is RIGHT ON POINT with the indispensable question.

The question that you have to ask yourself – daily, rather than once – is “What can you do to make yourself indispensable to your customers?”

A few examples to get the juices flowing:

• If you sell coffee, how can you help your customers wade through the coffee buzzword maze and enjoy *better* coffee? What’s fair trade? Is it really fair trade, or is it just another marketing buzzword?
• If you sell cars, how can you help your customers make better decisions, get more from their investment, and save time and money on repairs? How can you help them remember to perform the regular maintenance that allows them to depend on their vehicle regardless of the weather?
• If you repair lawn mowers, how can you help your customers get a better looking yard, without injury, cheaper, safer and faster? How can you save them time and money on upkeep and repairs? How can you help them remember to change their oil, sharpen their blades and make their mower perform better and longer?
• If you help people deal with (and prevent) legal problems, how can you help your customers avoid rushing into your office with a problem that has to be solved NOW? Ounce of prevention, pound of cure kinda stuff. Be their lawyer every day or every week, just a little vs. being their rescue squad every 5 years.
• If you treat people’s injuries and diseases, how can you help them be safer at home and at work? How can you help them by advising them on nutrition and other preventative care, without becoming a nag? Knowing that these things require lifestyle / habit changes, how can you help your customers/patients make that happen? How can you help your patients make sense of the constant flow of health, nutrition and prescription information placed in front of them each day? How can you help them prevent injuries and disease, rather than waiting until they occur so you can treat them?
• If you sell building materials to professional contractors, how can you help them find more business so they can buy more building materials? Can you help keep them informed about industry promos, tax incentives and other things to help them be more competitive?
• If you sell advertising (better sit down), how can you help your clients track the effectiveness of all their advertising? How can you help them calculate the ROI on the advertising? Not guesswork, but real numbers based on the foot/internet traffic, revenue and profit each advertising source generates. Who is indispensable, the ad salesperson or the ad salesperson who is also a partner in profitability?
• If you sell computers, ANSWER YOUR PHONE. Those people on the other end of the phone who don’t know as much as you’ve forgotten about a computer are the ones with all the money. They’d like to give it to you, if only you’ll help them. Yes, to be indispensable in the computer business, quite often it’s as simple as answering your phone and helping them with their problem without being arrogant. In fact, just answering your phone will be a huge first step.

If I didn’t mention the business you’re in, use these things as inspiration to do what makes your business indispensable to your customers. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that because your specific type of business wasn’t mentioned, it won’t work for you. Likewise, if you’re thinking to yourself that “my business is different, it won’t work for me”, you’re right. If you don’t do these things – they won’t work for you.

The goal in doing all of these things is to position yourself and your business as the only place that your clients will consider doing business. Arrive at that position by doing this kind of stuff and both your checkbook and your customers will thank you.

Take care of them like no one else is willing to.

photo credit: psiaki

Profit is an evil word in many circles these days, but I used it anyway.

Are you the innovation leader in your market?

It seems to work for Apple.

Think back to your last real innovation. Yes, that one.

Remember that product or service that made customers and prospects flock to your office, store, website, trade show booth or reseller displays?

Once you got to that point, business sure did seem easy, didn’t it?

Think a little farther back. How’d you get there?

Follow the thought process that made you decide to reach out a bit more than normal.

Isn’t it worth being your market’s or even your industry’s thought leader again?

Sure makes those trips to the bank a lot more fun.

photo credit: Jesslee Cuizon

Today’s guest post is from Jeff Bullas, and addresses 22 of the many reasons your business or organization – no matter how small – needs a mobile app.

Just because your organization is small doesn’t mean you can’t have one. There are numerous tools to create simple ones, but the very least you can do is optimize your website for mobile browsers.

The eventual goal should be not just to give them a mobile browser friendly site (which is a good start), but to create an app that puts a fence around your clients by making it easier to do business with you, easier to get service, easier to stay informed about things related to your business that THEY care about and by (as usual) doing what none of your competitors have the nerve to do.

photo credit: Angel T.

Coincidentally, that was the premise of one of those annoyingly “innocent” questions I like to ask.

The question on Twitter? “Does your church podcast their sermon recordings?”

Note the assumption – that your church already records them. I asked that way intentionally so that anyone who doesn’t know would think to themselves…”do we even record them?”

A pastor saw my question on Twitter and asked “Why should a church podcast its sermons?”

Which is exactly what I hoped would happen: We’d talk about what “other people” do.

Many churches don’t record, much less podcast their sermons – but some do. Meanwhile they have all kinds of programs in place to reach out to shut-ins, the infirm, nursing homes, traveling church members (many folks are working away from their hometown these days) and so on.

Think about it: Who doesn’t have an iPod or access to the Internet these days? Not too many folks. The last numbers I saw said that 77% of the US population has high-speed internet access (I think that’s a bit high, but that’s another discussion).

Apple’s free iTunes podcast service (like many others) will let you broadcast audio (or video) recordings globally. The price is the same to your local shut-in, a traveler on the road or a deployed soldier.

Free. And most importantly for them, they can listen on their schedule.

If you had to choose between folks not hearing your sermon all vs. not hearing it until their Monday workout or during their commute (very high focus time), what’s your preference?

When I asked Twitter and Facebook why their church podcasts sermons, this is just one of the responses: “We are reformed so this past year I did look for podcasts about John Calvin since we celebrated 500th anniv of his birth.”

People are looking to consume (learn / read / watch ) info that’s important to them. Their lives might not allow them to be in church every week. I suggested to this pastor that during his next sermon, he should ask this question: “Raise your hand if you’re on Facebook.”

Where are your customers when they aren’t in front of you?

photo credit: Zach Dischner

As I noted yesterday, my current survey here at Business is Personal asks “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?”

Yesterday, we discussed why 25% of respondents have said “Making time to do the marketing” and how they should go about fixing that.

Today, the next largest group (a very close second) is those who said “Differentiating my business from competitors” or offered a response that effectively means the same thing.

Consider “adding air” to the product or service you sell.

What I mean by air is something that:

• Adds substantial value – from the customer’s viewpoint – to what you sell.
• Doesn’t add substantial (or any) cost to what you sell (this is why people call it “air”)
• Competitors haven’t bothered to add to their offering, so your product/service looks better/more complete, has a higher perceived/actual value.

The net result is that you can ask a higher price. You’ll stand out from the other guy.

Hopefully by now, I don’t have to say “Air is not lame, low value puffery”.

Example Air

Let’s say you sell premium brand house paint. Every hardware store and home improvement box store sells premium paint.

How in the world would you stand out? You can’t likely compete on price (thankfully) because they buy more in a month than you buy in a year.

Rather than try to meet the local box store’s price, talk about the time your customer will waste driving into town, dealing with traffic and talking to paint people who maybe don’t know paint. Sure, this means YOUR paint people will actually need to know paint, but they should anyhow.

Still need to add some air? You could negotiate with a local painting company to include drop cloths and stir sticks with the paint crew’s business name and 24-hour emergency number. Oh and print “Tired of this? We’ll finish the job.” on those items. Who hasn’t gotten 20 feet up on a ladder (or bit off more than they could chew) and wondered why in the world they didn’t get a pro to do the job?

Oops, I forgot a stir stick

Think about the last time you bought something that required additional pieces/parts. Doesn’t it annoy you to get home and find out you forgot something? Shouldn’t the sales / register staff where you bought that something take low-key steps to make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need?

Almost everyone complains about not having enough time to do (whatever), so go out of your way to save your customers’ time – and make note of it. How long would it take to drive from your premium paint aisle to the paint aisle at Home Depot? Put up a sign in your paint aisle noting that and thanking them for supporting a locally owned business.

Sell some air. Stand out. Be the best paint store in your county. Be the ONLY choice for someone who needs a can of premium paint, not because no one else sells it, but because no one else sells it and takes care of paint customers like you do.

After doing all that… your biggest marketing challenge WON’T be “Differentiating my business from competitors”.

Saw this a few days ago from @dontheideaguy.

I’m trying to figure out why every other place that sells beans or ground coffee doesn’t make a point of being happy to take ANY Starbucks bag (not just the “specially marked bags”), year-round.

Toss that old bag or make an example of it.

Staple it to the wall like a number on a scoreboard and sell that Starbucks bag totin’ person a bag of *your* coffee.

Lessee, give away a $2 (retail) cup of coffee while selling a $10-$15 bag of fresh roasted beans? OK, if I have to.

It isn’t just reading that’s fundamental. Math is too.

photo credit: powerbooktrance

It must be all those trees we have. They’re so full of customers that businesses just don’t need any more.

As you know, I strongly encourage folks to buy local.

The flip side of that is that locals have to EARN the business. Not just because you’re here, but because you kick butt at what you do.

Jeepers

I called a couple of stores about getting a sound bar for my son’s Jeep as a gift to acknowledge a major accomplishment he recently completed.

One said: “We don’t have them but we have the speakers for them.”

The Department of Obviousness requires that I inform you that the holes in these sound bars are designed to fit common speaker sizes so that retailers don’t have to stock custom speakers.

After checking the store, another said: “I don’t think we can get anything like that.”

No one said “We don’t carry that, but I can get it here tomorrow and install it for you. When would you like to bring the Jeep in?”

The last answer is what keeps people from buying car audio gear on the internet.

The point

While I’m only talking about a $200 purchase plus installation, the big picture was missed.

The size of this purchase isn’t the point.

What you *must* get across to your staff (no matter what you do) is that the real long-term reason to make a sale is to *get a new customer*. 
After that, it’s their challenge to keep us as customers.

I suspect car audio industry research tallies the average annual spending of customers. If that figure is only $100, at one new customer per week, you’d add an average of $5200 to your gross sales per year.

Your market is no different.

Has dealing with your store become so unremarkable that customers would rather pay for shipping and wait a few days?

Walking to Missoula

I was in a cloth store recently, buying some material so a local business owner could make some custom neckerchiefs for my Scouts.

They had less material than I needed. They offered to order more, advising me that it could take 3 to 6 weeks.

They didn’t mention their corporate-run online store. I checked it myself, finding an in-stock quantity of only three yards. That wasn’t how much the local store had, it indicated (incorrectly, I suspect) the corporate’s in-stock quantity.

Meanwhile, the Missoula store had plenty. I know this because the local store is advanced enough to be able to check this from their handheld terminals (nice!). When I asked them about getting it from Missoula, they said it would take “about 3 weeks”.

I can *walk* to and from Missoula in three weeks.

Trucking in the wrong direction

Recently I was outside of Missoula at a truck stop and bought a small toolkit for a task that had me sidelined on the road. As the cashier finished ringing it up, I realized I’d bought the wrong thing. Yes, my fault.

While standing at the counter, before the salesperson walked away, before picking the item up from the counter, while putting my wallet back in my pocket, I asked to return it, unopened.

Without a second’s delay, they said “We have a strict corporate return policy. No returns.” 
Even if the unopened item has never left the store, much less the cash register.

It’s early on Saturday evening and there is no weekend on-premises manager. She won’t be back until Monday and no one else is allowed to take responsibility.

Stunningly “customer-friendly”.

Earl Nightingale once said something like “To be successful, observe what the majority in your market are doing, then do the opposite”.

These are good examples of his advice.

photo credit: Sabbath Photography

So far it’s been an incredible year for snow in the Northwest.

Two feet in the Washington DC area is a Snowpocalypse?

That’s nothing.

We have 8 feet of fresh pow* in Montana, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. It’s so deep, we’re carving mad turns in our driveways and carrying avalanche beacons when we go out to get the mail.

Come out and join us and ski and ride your brains out!

Oh wait. Maybe not that much snow, but come on out anyhow.

Which truth is real?

As with other markets where misinformation can lead a customer astray, the internet has a way of finding the truth, even about mad pow*.

When skiers and snowboarders hop off the lift expecting to find the foot of fresh powder mentioned in the snow report and instead, find a couple inches of popcorn**, it doesn’t excite them.

When skiers and snowboard riders find a few feet of waist-deep powdery goodness, they can now use their cell phones to report snow conditions via Facebook, Twitter and this killer skier/snowboarder snow report app.

This app has forced resorts to come clean on their snow reports.

Thing is, it isn’t just snow conditions that are available in (close to) real-time from a source that’s cutting turns in it right now. Whatever you do, there is likely an enthusiast community talking about it

Whether we’re talking about stream flows, fish and wildlife migration, trail conditions, road conditions, whiter whites and brighter brights, parking availability, meal quality, service quality and more…it’s out there on the net for the savvy customer who wants to check you out before buying.

Help them find it – and don’t claim to be shredding pow in your driveway unless you really are

* Translation: Fresh, deep, powdery snow, often blamed for high levels of absenteeism at work and/or school.

** Translation: smallish, hard popcorn-looking snow that looks like that stuff sprayed on ceilings in office buildings and homes. Not really what you want to ski/ride on, but still better than a good day at work.

Your competition’s employees in LowRentEconomyIstan are willing to work this hard – and not for $50K a year. Maybe for 50 cents a day.

Someone mentioned to me privately after reading Where were you that if he didn’t know better, he’d think I was trying to put a guilt trip on folks.

He didn’t mention it (though I know he realized it) that my real point was that anyone used to competing locally has already found (or will soon find) themselves competing in a statewide / regional / national / global market.

How you react is the critical thing.

Whaddya do, wait, whine or work?

A friend’s business is facing a similar challenge.

For two decades and then some, they’ve competed against local and in-state firms.

That’s all changed now.

In the last year or so, every single opportunity they’ve bid on has had national and regional players at the table.

My guess is that some of you are experiencing the same thing.

In that environment, in their market, qualifications aren’t likely to even make it into the discussion before local firms get pushed off the table.

The national firm’s materials will make them the obvious choice (where have you heard that before?) because a local firm’s marketing materials, sales expertise and experience will be *normally* be hard pressed to match that of a national firm.

Of course, those processing the bids won’t acknowledge it and they might not even realize they’re doing it because worst case, it happens subconsciously as if they were staring at a pretty girl or a handsome man.

Because they have to compete on a bigger, shinier stage, these firms have honed their image and their materials over years of competing with other national and regional firms. It’s quite possible that some of them have had to battle it out with international competitors.

That leaves the local firm with the same choice we discussed a while back: Wait, Whine or Work.

Again, we circle back to “what other people do”. What do they do to succeed that you don’t yet do? It doesn’t matter how important *you* think these things are. What matters is how important they are in the minds of your customers and prospects.

In simple terms: What’s the market think? How do they buy? Why do they buy? What puts them over the edge?

Your reasons don’t mean much. Theirs mean everything. Either you deal with global competition or it’ll deal with you.

Waiting around for some Senator to “fix” your competitive problem isn’t gonna help. Fix your competitive position yourself. It’s faster and a lot cheaper than a politician.

photo credit: truedudi

As we discussed yesterday, anti-competitive businesses sometimes do “unfair” things.

Occasionally, they commit illegal acts to gain an edge. Commonly mentioned examples include bribing officials to get contracts or have them look the other way on enforcement or quality issues.

Sometimes the unethical things are illegal, such as refusing to sell spare parts to repair shops that compete with the manufacturer’s repair department.

The CPSIA/Mattel inspection situation is an example that surely makes you wonder. Legal (perhaps), but unethical handling by both Mattel and the CPSC.

Ultimately, competitive behavior has two sides. Let’s discuss a few examples…

Where were you when Pittsburgh, Tokyo and Guangzhou were investing in internet and manufacturing infrastructure?

• Were you talking about how your infrastructure/facilities were “good enough”?
• Do you (or did you) laugh at the quality of products that say”Made in China”? Do you find better alternatives locally?
• When other companies moved call centers to India, did you follow suit in order to cut costs? Or did you follow suit because they provided better service to your customers?

Where were you (and what were you up to?) when Apple was designing the iPhone? When Amazon was designing the Kindle?

• What – besides stare and/or cuss – have you done to respond to those “threats”?
• If you aren’t the most strategically advanced vendor in your market – what have you done about that this year? Next year, will you be in a higher position strategically than you are now? How will you get there?

Where were you in the 90s when Amazon was investing in the long term, developing their e-commerce platform and despite their youth, doing e-commerce far better than anyone else? Note: “investing in the long term” often called “losing tons of money” on Wall Street.

• Did you spend any time figuring out how your business could incorporate e-commerce – or if it even made sense to do so?
• When the Kindle came out, did you buy one to better understand the competition that just popped you in the mouth with a right cross?
• When Costco and WalMart started offering best sellers at or below your wholesale cost, did you complain about unfair competition or did you do something to make your business a better place for readers to buy books?

Where were you over the last 30-40 years as Wal-Mart laid the foundation for today’s domination? (and then continued to improve upon it – and did so right in front of your eyes)

• Were you making it easier to buy?
• Were you making it easier to park and enter your business?
• Were you making is easier to pay your invoice, shop, ship, get a refund, repeatedly place an identical order, or talk to customer service?
• Were you giving your customers more reasons than ever to come to your store instead of the local box store?
• Did you start to build(or enhance) a high-value relationship with your customers that no minimum wage employee in a blue vest could *ever* break?

Where were you when Mumbai built business centers out of slums, trained tens of thousands of workers, and built a modern communications infrastructure?

• Were you enjoying your existing legacy, built 40-50-60 years ago? (Ask Woolworth where that got them).
• Were you letting your city or your manufacturing plant rot while holding out for another government bailout or sweetheart contract with a government entity?
• Did you spend more on lobbyists in the last 5 years than you did on educating your employees?

Where were you when colleges and secondary schools in China and India were ramping up the quality and technological level of the training they deliver?

• Were you complaining about your school taxes or local school boards?
• Were you complaining about the parking problems caused by the local university?
• Were you whining about the foolishness of having a local community college?
• Did you sigh in disgust after interviewing yet another unqualified prospective employee?
• Did you complain to your CPA or another business owner about the cost of training your staff?
• Were you still running Windows 95 in your schools?
• Were you ignoring the fact that most of the local school’s students are more technologically savvy than their teachers or administrators (much less their parents)?
• Have you ever looked at the budget for your local school board? For that matter, do they make it readily available?
• Have you thought to yourself “Yeah, but we can’t do that here, this is *your town’s name*?”

When things go south

When things go south, our culture (I’m speaking of the U.S., primarily) is to find someone to vilify…to blame. Generally speaking, we must point the finger at someone because it can’t possibly be our fault.

You’ll be glad to hear that I can save you some time there.

If you insist on laying blame, the person who can pull you out of it is the same person can blame: You.

Tomorrow, we talk about that and the ROI (return on investment) of blame.

After 3 days, we’re finally going somewhere positive and useful with all of this.

photo credit: Meanest Indian

Yesterday, we talked about fierce competition from other places and other businesses, as well as doing your homework.

At the end of the day, all things pointed to a single bottom line: What has happened to our business(es) and thus to our communities is JUST NOT FAIR.

If Pittsburgh’s businesses have better internet or manufacturing facilities than your town: That’s not fair.

If businesses in Mumbai only have to pay their workers $10 an hour while you have to pay $42 an hour: That’s not fair.

You get the idea. In fact, I’m sure you could reel off other examples that are meaningful to your business, but ultimately, we’ve gotta find someone to BLAME. So let’s get to it.

Assigning blame

Let’s call the union bosses and blame them for not protecting our jobs. Let’s call the politicians and blame them for raising taxes. Let’s blame engineers, programmers and their employers for creating the technology and automation that’s stealing work from us.

And let’s most definitely blame those danged “foreigners” because they don’t want another generation of their kids living in a disgusting slum and drinking from a stream that 4000 of their neighbors pee into.

They have a lot of nerve, don’t they? We deserve that work.

Let’s blame Microsoft for changing their software too quickly (or too slowly). Let’s blame Apple for putting out a “phone” that made everyone rethink what mobile could really do for us.

Wait, I’ve got it… we’ll say these companies are “ANTI-COMPETITIVE”.

We can get our politicians to put them out of business, or at least make things fair. Maybe we can get the Feds to hobble them somehow.

But let’s not spend any time or money investing in ourselves and improving our business, our people, and our products and services. Let’s not totally rethink the market we serve and how we serve it.

That’s what those other people do.

We’ll continue the discussion tomorrow. I think you see where we’re headed.

In the meantime, I’m curious: What does “anti-competitive” mean to you?

PS: The girl in the photo has a lot of nerve helping her brother and sister with their homework using a small chalkboard while sitting on a piece of slate on the dirt floor or her parents’ shack, don’t you think? It just isn’t fair that her parents aren’t paying school taxes or private school tuition. In fact, she probably isn’t even following the approved government-mandated curriculum. If that’s not anti-competitive…

That’s Tom Peters via YouTube.

Initially, he talks about teenagers when referring to a quote from Thomas Friedman, but if you step back a bit, “do your homework” could – and should – be applied to all of us.

Perhaps Tom felt it was easier to make the point about China and India (especially given the “clean your plate” anecdote), but it really isn’t about China or India at all (more on that in a moment).

It’s about competition in general.

Depending on what you do, your fiercest competition might come from Seattle (Amazon), Bentonville (WalMart), Guangzhou, Pittsburgh, Mumbai, Memphis (FedEx) or right down the street.

Once someone has put you out of business (CPSIA and similar issues notwithstanding), it really doesn’t matter where the competition came from, whether it was WalMart, Amazon, Radio Shack or Joe’s Electronics.

No matter how you slice it, the people selling all those cheap Chinese-made electronics (or whatever) put you out of business.

Or your competition ships all their customer service or manufacturing jobs offshore, cutting their costs drastically. “Suddenly”, you can’t compete.

Once your payroll checks start bouncing, you’re still history, no matter what the cause.

If only Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, your Governor or Congress had done something…

Please leave a comment and tell me… who/what do you blame?

We’ll talk more about this as the week progresses.

photo credit: JustinLowery.com

You’ve probably heard the saying “No rest for the wicked” (or weary). Weary might be a better choice in this case.

Should you be scared like the author suggests that Microsoft perhaps should be?

Microsoft, like many successful companies large and small, has reinvented itself before. It’ll probably have to do it again, and perhaps so will Google. I’m not here to help them though.

If Amazon starts selling online to your market and does so with better prices and free shipping – do you just roll over?

I don’t think so, but that’s your choice.

One thing to keep in mind – Never forget what business you’re really in.

If it’s a business in a market that is easily transformed into a commodity, transform how you deliver value. Deliver it to additional markets.

Think a little…

Scared is the wrong word, don’t you think?

photo credit: carolune

Those of you who know my backstory may remember that I was trained as a programmer and that I worked in the software industry for 17 years before coming to my senses. IE: before owning my own software company. A real one, not those other ones.

So much for that coming to my senses thing.

This whole small business marketing, blogging, writing columns, books, speaking thing came to me by brute force – perhaps like your business came to you.

Like you, I owned a small business, so I had to get myself educated, fall down a time or two, look up from the seat of my pants in the dirt, pick myself up and get something positive accomplished because Kevin Costner’s character in  the only one who can build something and magically expect someone to show up. (To my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Terry – I will *not* diagram that sentence, sorry).

It’s a small world, after all

The programming world is a small one and one of the benefits of it is that you meet people from all over the world and find bugs in their programs (and they return the favor).

Programmers were social (even the kinda geeky ones) well before anyone thought of Facebook and Twitter. We had Compuserve and Usenet and BBS systems and all that fun stuff.

Nowadays, it’s even easier to meet folks from other places thanks to cheaper (really) air travel, conferences and of course, the internet.

Often you’ll know them for years before you get to meet them face to face. For example, I know several programmers from South Africa.

Despite having some rather brilliant programmers, South Africa has what you and I would likely consider rather horrible internet service. It isn’t necessarily their fault, it’s simply because there’s not enough bandwidth to go around.

Because the demand outweighs the currently available supply, bandwidth gets rationed because there is only so much to go around. Mmm, baby what a great time in our lives to mention rationing. No, we will not discuss health care. You’re welcome.

The Great Race

Recently, one of South Africa’s technology companies apparently got more than a little fed up with their internet service (from South Africa’s largest internet provider) and decided to have a little contest.

Enter the pigeon.

This geeky firm decided to have a little fun with a little race. The goal? To see what was faster: their high-speed internet connection that costs their company R45000 ($6000 = 45000 South African Rand) a month… or a pigeon.

You might call it sort of a Pinewood Derby of the internet.

Contestant number one would copy 4GB of data to a digital storage card (a micro SD if you are taking notes), then attach it to a homing pigeon’s leg and free the pigeon to fly 80 kilometers to one of their locations, then copy the 4gb file from the digital card.

Contestant number two (a computer) would try to transfer that same 4GB file to the same office location 80 km away.

If you’re thinking “This will not turn out well” for the telecom company, you are correct.

An excerpt from tech company’s blog: “Basically we will be flying a pigeon with a 4GB micro SD card from Howick to our central site in Hillcrest. We did a dry run yesterday. Here are the stats: Pigeon took 48 minutes to deliver the data. ADSL is still downloading. Telkom got hold of this via the media and is currently in a flat spin. We got a call from Telkom asking us for our circuit numbers so they can make sure we have good service. Here is the best part. We spend +/- R 45000 a month just on rental for these lines. If we moved to the Avian Carrier Network we will be saving a whopping R 35 000 a month.”

R35000 is $4640.57. That’s savings per month by using the pigeon, while getting vastly better performance. Not a good day to be their telecom provider, especially on the word of mouth marketing scorecard.

If you are in the internet business, you know that even with my whoppin’ 15mb down / 1mb up connection here at the Columbia Falls Data Center (otherwise known as my home office), moving that 4gb file would take the better part of a day – and that’s if I’m downloading it. Uploading would take even longer.

Yes, the internet will be slower than the pigeon over short hops with big files. New York to Los Angeles would be a different story.

I got your value right here.

The point of all this? To provoke you to ask yourself some hard questions.

Are you providing value?

Would you pay your hard-earned money for the products and/or services you’re offering to your market?  Not grudgingly, but gladly – because the value and quality is outstanding.

About the pigeon: Think I’m making it up? Check these out: http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE5885PM20090909, http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/vlad/2009/09/09/telkom-vs-a-pigeon-who-will-win/ and finally, http://pigeonrace2009.co.za/ which provides great comic relief by resulting in “Bandwidth exceeded” messages.