photo credit: Misserion

Last week, I walked past the door of a just-closed business – one I often used for both business and personal services.

It was a shock, particularly since it was a franchisee of a very large business – one I’ve *never* seen close before.

Then I remembered what I’d seen there during every recent visit over the past month or two: the front desk staffer was never behind the front desk when I walked in. Instead of being behind the counter, they were in the retail space playing a Facebook game called “Farmville” – on a computer intended for customer use.

While there are legitimate uses for Facebook, Twitter (etc) at local businesses, this isn’t one of them.

When I entered the store, the employee would get up and go behind the counter and provide acceptable service.

I noticed a change in this place right after the holidays. The enthusiastic, eager-to-please employees (2 in particular) disappeared and were replaced with “average/meets typical expectations”.

Maybe that enthusiastic person was the owner and they were filling in during the Christmas rush, no matter what, their departure definitely impacted their service.

The real source of this problem

Yes, I’m talking about the owner/manager.

Sitting around playing games isn’t all the employee’s fault. It’s primarily an indicator of a management problem, particularly since someone, somewhere had to know that the business was close to dying.

So why is the Farmville-fest the owner’s problem?

Because the person playing the game couldn’t have had enough measurable work to perform.

If there isn’t enough business coming in, that person could have been tasked with putting together mailing, calling existing customers (I know *I* never got one) to see if they could help with any current projects, emailing existing customers, or worst case – dusting the place.

You get the idea.

Failing to Plan

Without such tasks to perform, you don’t have enough work to do, and at this point, anything would be better than leaving your staff with nothing to do but play Farmville.

A strategically designed marketing plan would produce work from both new and existing clients. Even in the worst of all possible situations, working the plan would produce *some* work of its own.

Then the Farmville farmer would have something more productive to do – and it’d be measurable so you’d know if anything was getting done without having to hover over them.

Having meaningful work for your staff to perform is ultimately your responsibility.

If you don’t give your staff substantive, profit-generating work to perform when retail customers aren’t standing in front of them – you’re get to pay twice: once for their wages and once for the lost revenue / lost customers.

Can you afford that?

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More customers, more productivity, more profit. Guaranteed.

That’s my USP (unique selling proposition), but some might also call it my mission statement. I don’t really look at it like a mission statement by someone’s pure definition, but in a lot of ways – they are the same thing.

So why is it that and not something like “blah blah blah optimal blah blah blah cohesive blah blah blah forward-thinking blah blah solutions blah blah blah”? (as spoken by Charlie Brown’s teacher)

Other than the fact that I can actually *remember* the short one, it’s because I’ve been through the process Dan Heath describes below in this short 3 minute video:

It’s usually an AWFUL process and interestingly enough – after all that self-inflicted punishment, I always work my way back to the original statement and keep it because it’s short and powerful. It doesn’t have a lot of crap, wordsmithing or baggage. Believe me, I’ve tried adding words to it like “I help small business get …” and so on.

EVERY time, I end up pulling those things out.

Norm at Norm’s News in Kalispell says “Eat dessert first”, for example. They sell old-fashioned candy, milk shakes like your great grandpa talks about and so on.

Is yours short and powerful?

Is yours not only short enough to remember, but powerful and impactful enough to act on and motivate others? I hope so.

Don’t stop there – Now apply this to your marketing message(s).

If they feel like something that came from the meeting described in the video, ask yourself a few questions:

• Could this be why your marketing is so darned boring?
• Is this why your response rate is 0.005%?

Uh, yeah. Probably so.

Take that dude with the corporate-speak hat out in the parking lot and have him park cars, wax deck chairs or something until that stuff clears out of his mind. Maybe toss one of Seth’s books at him.

No matter what – take a firehose to that vocabulary. It’s boring, it doesn’t stand out in any crowd and it sure doesn’t compel anyone to do business with you – not even the stodgiest of companies.

Now, start over. Remember what you wanted to do when you started this thing? Remember the stuff you do for customers that gets you jacked up? Remember the thing that you’d rather do than almost anything (yeah, besides “that” and skiing, of course).

That’s what your mission – and most likely your USP – is all about.

Update: A nice resource from Dan and Chip Heath to help you get this process right, tossing out the stuff you dont need.

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photo credit: matticgn

Yesterday, we talked about David Lee Roth’s M&Ms trick and how it acted somewhat like a canary in the coal mine.

It probably looked like a silly “diva clause” to everyone but Roth. A little, unimportant detail.

These little details that your competitors ignore or see as unimportant might be the one thing that customers view as an indicator of additional, more serious problems.

They’ll stick out even more when you take care of them, as if you pointed a laser beam at the very things they never wanted anyone to notice.

Don’t let those little things undermine your customer relationships. Use them.

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photo credit: Robert Scoble

A while back, Robert Scoble wrote a terrific post on Scobleizer about the worst things that startups do.

I suggest you hop over there and check it out even if you aren’t in the technology business. When you’re done, come back so we can apply Robert’s comments to your not-a-startup small business. (Psst…While you’re over there, I suggest you subscribe to his blog, even if you aren’t in the tech world. You’ll be glad you did.)

Now that you’re back, let’s look a little closer at Robert’s list because it isnt just startups that make these mistakes. Here’s a small business angle on his list of mistakes:

1. Have plush offices in the most expensive part of town.

I haven’t managed to make this mistake as yet. Haven’t used someone else’s money for a startup though, maybe that’s why.

On the other hand, there have been times when I should’ve kept my office at home and didn’t. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes not. Think hard about the reasons why. Cash flow is always a concern, and more often than not, a critical strategic piece.

2. You can’t tell me what you do in a single Tweet.

For those who don’t use Twitter, that means: “Describe your business in 140 characters.”

For me, the Twitter version is “I help small businesses get more customers, become more productive and make more profit. Guaranteed.”

I find myself tinkering with that now and then, but it always seems to come back to the basics. If you aren’t interested in getting / keeping more customers, becoming more productive and more profitable, we don’t have a lot in common to build to a business relationship on.

3. If I look around and don’t see programmers.

Scoble’s talking about tech startups, but his point hits home for you as well – no matter what you do.

In a tech startup, programmers mean product and service creation. Someone’s creating something. In your business, product and service creation are equally important.

For me, if I’m not marketing, creating products and services, or delivering them…you could say I’m wasting time.

4. You hire a PR firm. (4b: you don’t have a blog and a Twitter account)

Hilary will probably beat me up a little about this – but note Scoble’s criteria – *startups*. If you don’t have a product or service for sale yet, most companies don’t need a PR firm. There are exceptions, but your business likely isn’t one of them.

If you’re open for business, this one isn’t a mistake unless you’re doing it really badly.

Example mistake: Referring anyone and everyone with questions to sales or PR (or someone else) because they aren’t allowed to talk to the public, or the press, and so on.

I don’t mean questions about your top secret process, chemistry, electronics or whatever. I don’t want to know the “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you” stuff.

We want to know why we should care…and despite the secret sauce stuff that you can’t tell us, we also want to know why *you* care.

Every single person on your staff had better be able to tell your company’s story with passion (at least their part of it).

No one, including me, wants to be bored by you reading the 9 paragraph mission statement that no one – including the CEO – remembers.

Infect us with your enthusiasm for what you do, even if you’re a divorce or bankruptcy lawyer. Think about that for a minute.

I can tell you one thing – if you step into the room sometime when I’m speaking to a group, you’ll damned sure get infected with the idea that you can do better. Lots better.

5. They spend money on the wrong things.

In the programmer world, the bad chairs and lousy monitors Scoble talks about are right on the money. If you’re a programmer and you don’t have dual monitors (or more) on the computer where you write programs, you’re working with a dull axe.

In every business I’ve ever seen, there are resources that make people more productive, that make them feel valued, that make them happier to work harder.

No one likes being unproductive. Watching either the Windows hourglass or the little multicolored Mac spinning thing is *the most annoying thing in the world* to a computer user. How much of your staff’s day is spent doing that?

How’s that make them feel about the value and importance of their work?

Beyond that, what’s that time costing you?

6.  They don’t fire fast enough.

At almost every business, some of the best people leave because they aren’t being challenged or because others aren’t pulling their weight.

Just like Scoble said and it isn’t just startups.

Your best performers have little tolerance for those who aren’t performing, much less for poor tools. The situations that businesses put them in often are what force them to go out on their own. If you’d like to avoid competing against your best performer(s), provide your racehorses with the best possible environment and when you hire – hire the best possible folks to accompany them.

Don’t make Secretariat share a stall with Mister Ed, (no matter how cool he was).

7. You picked the wrong infrastructure.

Most of us have hitched our wagon to the wrong horse at one time or another.

Next time, choose better. Choose for the right reasons.

Is your web host critical? Is a steady supply of large amounts of electricity critical? If you start to grow, are there enough skilled employees available in the area?

We got lucky on this one – there was a call center nearby with *excellent*, well-trained people – and we hired some of the best folks in the valley.

8. You let VCs control your management team and strategy too early.

Most of you won’t ever deal with a venture capitalist, but the same kind of issues can hamper your growth and stability.

Does your ability to access capital control your strategy? Does the size of your American Express bill?

Cash flow is as strategic as any other aspect of your business, sometimes more so.

9. You have a too cool name and logo.

There’s nothing wrong with a great name and logo, but there had better be some meat on the bone.

10. You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions.

This is the one that used to get me, and it was a hard lesson to learn. One of my business partners used to ride me now and then about “building end tables when we needed coffee tables”.

In other words, “Give me the big stuff, the little stuff can wait”.

I’ll quote Jim Rohn as usual on this topic: “Saying no means you can say yes to something more important.”

This isn’t just about software. Everyone has decisions to make about what to do, not to do, whether you’re an attorney, a programmer, a car wash or a restaurant.

11. Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar.

In his post, Scoble said “…going with the same stuff your dad’s company used?”

Technology can be as strategically important as (almost) every hire you make.

Maybe not your choice of operating system or spreadsheet, but how you use technology to gain edge after edge.

This is one of the reasons why I bought a Mac last year. Most of my tech-related work is still on Windows, but for me to help myself and clients reach even higher, I needed to be able to explore custom iPhone/iTouch apps. That requires a Mac.

How have you stretched your technology-related capabilities lately?

12. You don’t change direction fast enough.

You’re either setting the tone or singing along.

If you’re echoing the moves of someone else, you’ll always be behind unless they misstep badly, not to mention that it’s pretty hard to lead a market in wait and see.

If that new thing is *the* next big thing or the next big flop, wouldn’t you rather know before everyone else? Wouldn’t you want to be the one taking your clients that direction first – or knowing first not to take your clients there?

Going to the moon isn’t about planting a flag and taking a picture. It’s about the challenges you face and the lessons you learn on the way to liftoff.

Think about Robert’s list. Where can you improve?

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photo credit: Dave Hogg

Today’s guest post is from bnet, where they profile a Boxing-Day-style reality show where the CEO works on the ground floor.

What would you find if you worked the bottom floor for a few days?

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photo credit: Peter Kaminski

Today’s guest post is from Pragmatic Marketing and asks the question…

If you could say one thing to your company president without fear of reprisal, what would you say?

Here are the results.

The question is, what would your folks say to you…and are you big enough to let them do so?

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Is your business activity planned this far ahead?

This commercial screams Covey’s “Begin with the End in mind”.

Where do you begin?

And how far out is the End that you plan from? (not for, *from*)

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photo credit: wildxplorer

Yesterday we talked about a retail experience that could have been better – mostly by doing something to encourage a customer to call you next time.

Did you notice the cost of yesterday’s suggestion? ZERO.

Today, we’ll talk about an experience related to yesterday’s story: Stock levels.

When you go to the websites of most retail stores these days, you can see stock level information. In some cases, you’ll see it for each store location.

In most of the big chain stores, this information is as close to real time as you can expect – in other words, if you check the website from your car and it says that 52″ Sony you have your eye on is the last one in stock, the chances that it’s still in the store are very good.

It might be in someone’s cart, but it should still be in the store.

In stock…maybe

When you start working with local and regional retailers, the information quality tends to go downhill a bit.

What I see is a combination of these things:

• “Call for stock info” (or a similar message)
• “Item in stock”
• “23 in stock”

The unfortunate reality of this is that none of this info is accurate.

If you’re going to have this stuff on your site – make it accurate, even if it has to say “Item in stock as of month, day, year” or “stock status updated every Friday”.

The alternative is having in-stock inventory info on your site, which your customer believes. In some cases, they make plans based on that info.

And then they find out that the info really means across your entire retail system as of a week ago, not of their local store. And even that might not be accurate.

If you don’t have the systems in place to keep this info accurate, ask them to contact you instead of relaying poor quality (inaccurate, outdated) information.

If you can get the info on your site up to date (and many of you probably can), then make it accurate to within an hour, or 5 minutes or real time – but state the accuracy for your customer’s convenience.

Remember, if people can’t trust your site…they’ll stop coming to it.

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photo credit: Falling Heavens

It’s a classic, if not overdone scene.

A plane, low on fuel and starved for altitude, flies over the ocean. As far as the eye can see, nothing but water. Her crew hustles to throw unnecessary items off the plane to lighten the load in hopes of gaining altitude and getting a few more miles out of what little fuel remains.

For a struggling business owner, the situation might not seem all that different.

Like a plane empty of unnecessary gear still flies because it has the essentials (thrust from the engines and lift from the wings), the business owner sometimes has to focus on survival strategies that keep them from crashing.

The trouble with working from a survival strategy is that’s all you often accomplish: Survival.

Your goal isn’t to just to keep from crashing, it’s to thrive, to accomplish that big thing that got you into this business in the first place – whatever it might be. It’s tough to see that when you’re barely afloat, but that focus is exactly what you it’ll take to get your business out of that survival mode.

Sure, spending time on the things that will get you over that current bump in the road is important – but if you do nothing else, all you’ll do is barely get over it and then be faced with the next. And another. And they’ll keep coming.

So what do you do? Take some time to think about where you really want to be. If everything worked out perfectly, what would you accomplish? It’s essential to spend time focusing on the long-term. “Where am I going?” is easy to look at as fluff, but that mission/ vision / goals stuff isn’t fluff because it drives everything else when nothing else will.

It tells you who you serve and who you don’t. It tells you what you focus on and what you ignore. It gets you out of bed in the morning when nothing else will. It’s what you talk about when anyone will listen. You know what you’re heart’s in. Admitting it to yourself is the hard part for many, especially you tough guys.

Without that and the focus it brings, your business focuses only on surviving (don’t let the plane crash), rather than cruising at 33,000 ft.

Find your mission and refocus on it

Spend some time over the next few weeks focusing on the real mission you want to accomplish. What got you interested in what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning, excited to do this work? Cash flow – while critical – isn’t it. Sure, it’s important, but few people get into a line of work solely because of it.

You’ll spend a lot of fuel climbing to cruising altitude, just like a plane does, but you’ll still be interested in the destination once you get there.

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photo credit: (A3R) angelrravelor (A3R)

Happy New Year in November?

I don’t mean the Chinese New Year, the Jewish New Year or the new Federal fiscal year. I’m talking about the regular old New Year that happens on January first.

Are you ready for 2010? Or will you start getting ready for it on January second like a lot of businesses do?

I know some that simply don’t do much of *anything* in December. Their business is open, but strategically, it may as well be closed till 2010.

If your business is struggling, I suggest you reconsider that strategy. In fact, I think you’re nuts to wait 6 more weeks to start your business’ new year.

Why? Sorry, I thought you were serious about your business.

From all I’m hearing on the street, some businesses are having a pretty good year (really!), but others are struggling a little and some are struggling mightily.

It’s pretty much like any other time except that the definitions of “struggling a little” and “struggling mightily” have changed substantially for a lot of folks.

So in order to help you have a Happy New Year, I want you to start your own stimulus plan by start the New Year today in your business.

Do it right now.

Did I just outlaw December? Nah.

BUT…You have about six weeks until January first. I suggest you put them to very good, very strategic use.

With the exception of retailers and a few others, right about now it’s very common for lots of businesses to start mentally winding down for the year.

I understand that the temptation to join them is strong. I also understand that for many, your business is sucking wind. If that’s the situation at your place, you just can’t wait six weeks to get serious again.

I don’t mean that you should skip all the family stuff you do for the holidays and work late on Christmas Eve. However, I do suggest that you get very strategic, very focused about how you use the valuable time left in the year rather than coasting through it like most everybody else.

Rather than not hiring, interviewing, or starting new projects because it’s the holiday season, I suggest you do just the opposite: Start / continue the process today.

Whatever it is, do it TODAY.

Get up an hour earlier on Thanksgiving (if you’re not in the US, get up early anyhow). Get up an hour earlier on Black Friday. Keep that up for the rest of the year. If nothing else, your area’s coffee business will improve (yes, that was a joke).

For every hour of work, ask yourself: “Is this getting me closer to where I need to be, or is it just busy work that I can delegate or not do at all?”

If you have new projects planned for 2010, think of the project as a fully loaded semi-truck (80,000 pounds of in-your-market coolness) and use the next six weeks as the acceleration lane to get that semi up to highway speeds, business-wise.

Finally, be ruthless with yourself and your time. Focus like your next meal is on the line cuz it might be.

Remember Jim Rohn’s comeuppance? (see below)

He couldn’t even afford to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies from the cute little Girl Scout at his door. A grown man with kids, working at an executive position.

That’ll focus you in a hurry. Are you that focused?

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photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

In the days before 9/11, our local airport (Glacier International aka FCA) had a mix of mostly Boeing 737/727, prop and regional jet traffic.

Since 9/11, most of our traffic other than flights to Minneapolis are regional jets or props. When I fly Delta to Salt Lake, for example, I’m usually flying some Delta Skywest regional jet (typically a Canadair model) that is codeshared with Delta.

Before much of the economy cratered over the last year, it wasn’t unusual to see two pilots in the cockpit of these regional jets that looked young enough to have just finished Rush Week at a local university.

Now, I don’t mean to put them down – after all, we always flew safely, never had an unprofessional effort by the pilots and the overall quality of the flight itself appeared no different than any other trip with more experienced pilots – still, there was always a comment or two by passengers when they saw a flight crew that looked like they had been shaving for less than 10 years (in the case of a male crewmembers).

With all the shakeup in the economy and airline industry, these regional jets are now being captained by what appear to be very experienced, mostly white-haired guys who are probably old enough to have flown combat in Vietnam.  As the airlines downsize the number of flights, experienced pilots get pushed down the system to the regional jets.

The smart thing that the airlines are doing – at least SkyWest – is pairing these experienced pilots with the younger pilots who were already flying with them. The ability to let these experienced folks mentor the younger pilots is huge – and it wasn’t something the airlines appeared to be doing prior to changes in the economy.

I talked with several passengers about this during my recent trip to Vegas and all of them found it not only smart business – but comforting to have 30+ years of experience in the cockpit instead of the assumption of 5 or 10 years – even if the younger pilot was doing the flying.

How does this relate to your business?

• How are your new staff members learning the ropes? How are they getting “co-pilot” experience with the equivalent of your white-haired, experienced pilots?
• Looking up into the cockpit and seeing a 50-ish white-haired guy brings confidence in the delivery of air travel without saying a word. For all we know, that guy had no more experience than the co-pilot, or came out of a 20 year retirement due to losses in the stock market and might have fewer regional jet flight hours than the young co-pilot. Didn’t matter, at least until we had the chance to find out more. What gives your customers’ confidence about your business’ ability to deliver with safety and high quality? What are you doing to show them the “white hair” or whatever it takes in your line of work?

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Download audio file (KingForADayVerizon.mp3)

photo credit: Sister72

I‘d like to introduce a new series called “King for a Day“. For the acronym-challenged, you might see me refer to it as KFAD now and then, so don’t assume I’m talking about a local radio station.

King for a Day is a series that will discuss some steps I’d take or issues I’d address if I was to become what else… “King (of a particular business) for a Day”.

The idea is to use big companies that many are familiar with and allow you to extrapolate from there to your business – whether its a good or bad thing they’re doing.

You should expect the discussion to center around the consumer for what I hope are obvious reasons.

If you’d like to nominate a business, add a comment and I’ll add your suggestion to the list.

I’ll be publishing KFAD on the first Friday of the month, so stay tuned for future episodes. Because these posts might get a little long, I will also podcast them. You might find a little bonus content in the podcast, so subscribe via iTunes, Google Reader or whatever you use to listen online.

One last thing to repeat before we start this exercise. This is not really about the companies that we discuss. All of this is just another way to get a point across that it’s about you, your company and most importantly, your clientele.

When reading the stories in KFAD, you should expect to:

• Search for parallels in your business
• Identify takeaways.
• Implement change for the good of your clientele – which will bring good things to you.

So let’s get started …

Focusing on the wrong thing

While it would be easy to start this out by being the King of the Airlines, I’ll mellow on that just long enough to give Verizon the treatment. The reality is that most of my comments would fit any cellular carrier, but Verizon is the one I’ve used for the last 5-7 years and thus am most familiar with.

Negative consequences

When I find a business in trouble, or simply annoying the heck out of me, it almost always seems to come down to them focusing on the wrong things.

For example, Verizon recently announced they would double their termination fee. How does this help their customers? Is it about punishing the customer? That simply won’t work.

Focusing on negative consequences completely ignores the customers who stay – and aren’t they the really important ones?

In fact, it marginalizes these customers because you’re clearly focusing on things they aren’t even doing. You’re focused on things you don’t want to happen instead of the things you *do* want to happen.

So not only do you tick them off, but your business is focused on the wrong, wrong, wrong thing – which doesn’t serve your customers.

Engage me in a Cinnabon-inspired lovefest

If I’ve made up my mind to leave you for an iPhone, a $300 termination fee isn’t going to stop me. In fact, it’s likely to tick me off and incentivize me to ramp up the goodness that I plan to milk from my new strategic communications device (no, it’s not just a phone).

Think about it: If *I’m* willing to put up with AT&T, I must have a *really* good reason to do so.

Instead of threatening me with doubled cancellation fees, you should be giving me a reason to stay. Give me lots of compelling ones, in fact. Give me things that make me want to write long, lilting caramel-covered blog posts about you that are as sickeningly sweet as a slightly under-cooked airport Cinnabon with extra frosting.  Hint: A good start would be to make it possible for me to buy a Verizon-compatible iPhone.

Focus on making changes that make your service so valuable that I *cannot* leave you. Don’t focus on things that cause you to waste management and technology resources – such as new ways to punish people who are likely leaving you anyway.

A man’s got to know his limitations

I have a 400 minute call plan. Rarely do I go over, but over the last 2 months, I’ve gone way over. I didn’t find out that little tidbit until the $400 bill arrived.

Any cell company that was interested in keeping their clients happy would tell me before that happened.

Any cell company that really cares would do what is reasonable (or do MORE than is reasonable) to see that their customers don’t make mistakes using their product. Common sense says that providing good customer care includes telling your clients when they are approaching an overage. Even banks do that.

Need a revenue source focus for this conversation? It’s a great opportunity to ask someone to upgrade their plan, even if only temporarily. Imagine that, getting paid for taking proper care of your customers.

Perhaps you might have a 3 day/week/month “Bump” plan that gives you an extra 100 minutes a week for when you’re out of town unexpectedly. Perhaps you could turn it on by dialing “*bump” and then go about your business.

When you do this, Verizon would automatically add the charge and 100 minutes per week (month, whatever) to your plan. Likewise, it would automatically terminate it after the 3 weeks/month/days or whatever.

No doubt, someone might say “we don’t have the ability to upgrade your plan, or sell temporary “bumps”, because our systems don’t allow for that”. I say – that’s an easily solvable problem in your billing system.

Same idea for text and data plans that near overage points.  (apologies to Clint for the heading)

Data plans (required)

Recently I took my 17 year old to the Verizon store to get him a new phone. His last one met with an unfortunate end of life scenario and this time, he was buying the phone himself.

Unfortunately, out of 20-30-40 phones (however many they had), only TWO could be activated without a data plan.

Now tell me, what 17 year old really *needs* a data plan? Can you justify $30 0r $60 a month additional for that? The salesperson’s line is that they aren’t allowed to sell the phone without a data plan.

For an iPhone, I get that. For a smart phone that is designed to be totally integrated with email such as a Blackberry, I get that. For a regular old cell phone, whether it has lame web capabilities or not, the customer should have the ability to get service without requiring an additional $400-$700 a year data plan – particularly for a teenager.

The iPhone (the official line vs reality)

Every time I go into the local corporate Verizon store, I ask when they are getting the iPhone.

I do it mostly to see what kind of response I get. Clearly they’ve been indoctrinated by corporate, because I get the same response every time. It’s something along the lines of “We don’t want the iPhone. It’s putting AT&T out of business and making their network too busy. Have you seen AT&T’s stock lately?”

Yeah, whatever. Have you seen AT&T’s churn rate lately? It isn’t because they offer the best service and customer care in the business.

Advice to whoever is training these folks: Get over yourself. You *want* your network to be hammered. Sure, you want it responsive, but you want more, more, more demand. You want the problem AT&T has, ie: “How much capacity can I build this year?” The more demand, the less likely you’ll ever lose them.

The source of the “Why would we want the iPhone?” attitude might be Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg himself. In 2008, Seidenberg’s childish response to iPhone question included calling the iPhone’s success a “conspiracy”.

Late in October 2009, it seems that 2 billion app store downloads and a 1% AT&T churn rate might have tempered Seidenberg’s attitude a little, as he responded to questions about Verizon selling the iPhone by noting that they were certainly interested and that it was “exclusively up to Apple“.

Disabled GPS chips

With the exception of the Storm and the (new) Droid, Verizon disables API (programming) access to the GPS chips in phones – *except* for their extra services/products. For example, you can’t use certain Google’s Mobile Maps features because Google can’t get to the GPS chip to say “Hey, where am I?”  How is that customer friendly?

It isn’t. You should be.

You get the idea by now I hope: It isn’t about you, your products or your services. It’s about all the things those products and services can do to benefit your customers.

Update: Karmically enough, the same day I post this, Apple Insider reports that a Verizon iPhone is on the way. That would keep me on Verizon.

Update: More on the topic from Digital Daily, including a reaction from Verizon.

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photo credit: paintMonkey

Yesterday, we went over the first 50 items on the NY Times’ “100 things restaurant staffers should never do”, and mentioned a few other folks that might also use those things even if they don’t own a restaurant.

Today, the NYT published the next 50, and once again – they might be focused on a restaurant staffer’s duties but you have similar, little tiny, insignificant things in your business that matter JUST AS MUCH.

Hopefully this list from a restaurant will help you find them in your place and do what makes sense for the customer.

What I hope you don’t do is discard the entire list because you disagree with one of them. We’ve all had a waiter do something little that bothered us, grossed us out, or whatever. Your staff does little things that have the same impact on your customers.

For example, do you have a counter service person who licks their index finger while flipping through papers? Do they then hand the paper over to the client? Normally, maybe a minor thing. In the days of H1N1 (swine flu), it may or may not be a way to transmit the flu but it will still cause concern.

Just a little thing…like the difference between the way water behaves at 211 degrees F vs. 212 degrees F.

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What if you did the right things and the smart things years before most of your competitors did? Wouldn’t that make life easier?

John Gerzema talks at TEDxKC about the post-crisis consumer (16m 34s), but there are some interesting business nuggets in here as well.

Smart companies, smart consumers

Gerzema talks about a lot of things that make the video interesting from a consumer and business perspective, but 2 things stuck out for me:

1) Some of the discussion is about all the changes that big companies are making to take advantage of the post-crisis consumer’s mindset, even though much of what they are doing are the things that *smart companies* have been doing for years.

They’ve been watching their expenses, tracking their advertising, spending money on investments they can measure, hiring smarter – and they’ve been doing this for years – just like the frugal consumers Gerzema talks about.

2) I found it interesting, and at times mildly amusing, that many of the “new” consumer trends that Gerzema’s team is discovering (presumably in urban areas) have been part and parcel of rural living for as long as anyone can remember. Emphasis on community, volunteering, ethics, “durable living”, not flaunting your bling (had to be said), and the like.

Most small town folks didn’t need the economy to crater to start doing those things.

Those 2 things aside, the 16 minutes is definitely worthwhile, so grab a cuppa joe and enjoy.

What to do next

Now that these things have reached beyond little towns like the ones around me and are reaching deep into urban areas, how can you adjust what your business is doing to get in step with the consumers where you live?

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photo credit: Todd Baker << technowannabe

Vann’s @NathanReep passed this on over the weekend and it’s a major league topic that’s definitely worthy of a guest post.

5 generations of workers in one workplace. How will you cope?

Different things got them there, different things motivate them. Whatever it takes to lead individuals from one of those groups is often quite different than what it takes in the others.

The differences in these groups are staggering.

The kids of the Greatest Generation started life with rotary phones, a couple of grainy black and white channels with nothing on and aspirations of gold watches and funded retirement plans.

The youngest of these generations watches video on their phones and wouldn’t typically expect a CEO to fund a retirement plan, much less expect it to be there when they retire.

All 5 groups possess valuable skills. All 5 contain great workers. All 5 tend to (as a group) value different things.

And you get to lead them all toward the same goals. Yours.

Leadership Flathead discussed this 2-3 years ago when I went through it but I’ve yet to hear much about it publicly since that time (there are a few local exceptions, but… few is the operative word).

The folks who figure this out first in their niche have a substantial advantage over their peers.

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photo credit: shioshvili

Today’s guest post is from John Hunter over at Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.

John’s a big Deming fan (as you should be) and despite the value of the list, he kept it short and sweet. Check it out at http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2008/11/13/6-leadership-competencies/

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photo credit: fazen

How do you keep up?

I was speaking to a group of small business owners the other day about websites and (to their surprise) mobile technology and how it should affect their internet strategy – or at least, provoke them to have one.

After (probably) scaring them a bit, that was the last question I was asked: “How do you keep up?”

Meaning – how is a small business owner who has to deal with sales, marketing, managing their staff, sweeping the floor, doing the books, promoting their business on Talk Like a Pirate Day and 117 other things – how does THAT person keep up with all that stuff, let alone have their fingers on the pulse of all this new mobile technology, their website, etc?

And how do they manage to find the time to keep their website updated?

If you don’t, you’re training your customers to not visit it.

Additional question I might hear from coaching clients: How do I keep up with all that stuff, plus the things you suggest that I should be doing???

Short answer: You don’t keep up with it all. So don’t sweat it.

Long answer: If it was easy, anyone could do it. Keep reading.

But what provoked the question?

Perhaps the fear of the unknown or the huge amount of change I laid in front of them.

One

So how do you keep up?

You really don’t. One thing adds to another thing, adds to another thing.

That’s one of the reasons my email newsletter signs off with “Do at least one thing today to get, or keep, a client.”

Set aside a little bit of time every single day, just like you do to work out, play golf, relax with a hot cuppa and the paper, and so on.

Put this “one thing a day” time in your calendar. The earlier in the day, the better. That way the crisis of the moment doesn’t come along and knock you off the rails.

• Maybe today you spend 15 minutes writing 2 blog posts, or an email for your email newsletter.
• Or you contact (or delegate it) 1 customer a day who hasn’t spent money with you lately.
• Or you contact your newest customer and ask them what they think about what you’re doing for them and why they chose you. Keep going in reverse order till you get to the customer you’ve had the longest.
• Or you contact the customer you’ve had the longest and ask them why they still use you. Again, keep going in reverse order till you get to your first customer.
• Or you read a chapter from a marketing, strategy, operations, social media (etc) book. Or a blog that offers similar assistance.

One thing a day. Same way you eat an elephant.

Then what?

If these things start getting traction, maybe they get more than 15 minutes a day. Maybe you hire someone to do them, or delegate them to a staffer you already have. Or you do less of the stuff that isn’t really having an impact. Or you automate what you can of the tasks that are now paying off. Or the ones you can’t stop doing that don’t appear to be making a difference.

Maybe you ask each department (if you have them) to do the same thing. Or you ask each of your employees.

Do one thing a day. 5 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever you can manage at first.

When you push water from 211 degrees F to 212 degrees F, amazing things happen.

One thing a day may be all it takes for your business to do the same kind of thing.

Once you spawn a culture of continuous improvement, hang on tight.

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photo credit: country_boy_shane

I lived in AR and TX during those states’ great “comeuppance” with their teachers (AR teacher certification under Gov Bill Clinton and No Pass, No Play in TX, among others).

It’s always interesting to watch the teacher’s unions protest testing and measurement of the skills of their members. But this isn’t a political rant, it’s an observation about the importance of measurement.

You might face some pushback in your business when you start doing these things – but remember whose business it is, and who is responsible for making payroll.

If you feel any responsibility for your employees’ job security (they should too), then you owe it to them to see who isn’t carrying their load and either fix em or get rid of them.

Every employee in the shop knows who the lamers are. Quite often, it annoys them too.

I’ll leave the rest to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and likewise, today’s guest post. He just happens to use teachers as one of his examples – and an easy to comprehend example at that.

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photo credit: aturkus

Millions of people depend on Gmail.

Sometimes it goes down unexpectedly.

Not long ago, people all over the world were “freaking out” and saying the F word (“Fail”) because Gmail was down.

In addition to numerous posts via Twitter and other social media, here’s how Google communicated a problem when they had a major downtime (their description – the downtime was not quite 2 hours).

Think about how your business responds when there’s a problem.

Do you keep it under your hat?

Do you update your clientele frequently so they remain calm, even if things aren’t going so well.

When things aren’t going so hot, it quite often ends up being more important how you communicate with your clientele when there’s a problem.

Here’s an example that’s a bit more serious.

It got worse for the business because they handled communication poorly.

Railroaded

A few months back, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) suddenly started buying (or trying to buy) pieces of track-side real estate in Whitefish MT (a resort/ski community in Northwest Montana) and Somers, MT (a lakeside resort area not far south of Whitefish).

No reason was given for the sudden interest in track-side land but people started talking. Conspiracy theories were abundant.

Here’s an excerpt from an early newspaper column about BNSF’s behavior:

Burlington Northern Sante Fe is up to something. The railroad giant has approached property owners in Whitefish and Somers, offering to buy their land. No one knows why, exactly, not even those who have been asked to sell. And BNSF isn’t talking – leaving entire neighborhoods apprehensive…

Eventually, residents got wind of BNSF approaching their neighbors and started asking questions. BNSF was mum about it, not even talking details with those they offered to buy out.

As a result, the residents made the natural move – they got attorneys.

Feeling the heat, BNSF decided to admit what was going on, albeit a bit too late to avoid looking a bit slimy.

By then, the tone had been set. Lying until you get caught is how things were gonna work, even if they were “only” lies of omission.

Coming clean only works in your favor when you do it upfront.

Without Grace

Not unlike W.R. Grace’s behavior in Libby MT (which echoed its earlier behavior in Woburn MA including lying to the EPA about their chemical use), BNSF had set the stage such that nothing they said was going to be trusted.

Before long, the EPA got involved and now BNSF has to do things the hard and likely more expensive way. Just like Grace, at least in Woburn.

While the BNSF and Grace situations are substantially more serious than a mere 100 minutes of Gmail downtime, that really isn’t the point.

Choice

The point is that there are two choices: Communicate in a manner that generates trust, or communicate in a manner that destroys it.

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photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

For Labor Day, it seemed to me that a TED video about the value of hard work was a good choice – particularly the kind of work I suspect few (if any) of my readers do.

Below, Mike Rowe from Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs talks about work, sheep, and a little bit of Greek.

Note: Some of this discussion might gross you out a little – but it is Dirty Jobs he’s talking about.

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