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: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

So today you wake up and find that you have only 15 days until 2010 (fewer than that if you count working days, at least for most people).

You vow that 2010 is going to be the year that you finally get your act together – despite the state of the economy, since can’t do anything about it but create your own…

Maybe you vowed that in 2009 and it did or didn’t go so well. Doesn’t matter. What’s gonna make 2010 DIFFERENT?

No matter how things are going, they could be better. If they’re going great, the challenge is to keep it that way and build upon your success.

So lets go over 5 things that you can do to make sure 2010 is the year your business gets the effort – and the results – it deserves:

Number 5: Become and remain brutally focused about the time you have and how you use it. Need some help with that? Try The Power of Focus and Dan Kennedy’s No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs

Number 4: “Put on the hat” of your biggest critic or doubter: Ask yourself some tough questions. Justify what you’ve done this year. Reflection is a critically valuable tool. It isn’t about guilt, it’s about recognizing the need (or lack of) for change as well as recognizing what went well.

Even better, take your biggest critic/doubter out for coffee and ask them to let you have it. Ask them to kindly critique the year they’ve seen from you and suggest what they think you should be doing. The feedback isn’t the result you’re looking for. Instead, consider your reactions to the conversation. How do they make you feel about your level of commitment and what you’re really trying to accomplish? Do something about it.

Number 3: Schedule communications (not boring ones) in some form with every customer, at least once every month. If you can’t figure out what to say to your paying customers, you aren’t thinking hard enough – or – they aren’t much of a customer to you. If you can’t afford to communicate with them (and I don’t mean just by email) on a monthly basis, it seems clear that your business model could use some work.

Number 2: Spend some time considering where the leading edge thinkers in your industry are going – and why. If one of those leading edge thinkers is you (be honest with yourself), think harder. Look outside your industry for ideas you can use and “convert” for your business.

• How do these things fit into your current plans?
• Do those plans need adjustment?
• Does your entire big picture need adjustment?
• Do any legislative changes affect you in the coming year?

Number 1: Spend an hour (I’d prefer you spend a day or two – or a week if you can do so) and really, seriously nail down a picture in your mind of a few things:

• What things in your business should look like on Dec 15, 2010.
• What that year of progress is really, truly working towards – yes, what exactly *is* your big picture?
• Did 2009 work toward it, or go somewhere else? If you don’t like the answer…do something about it.
• If you have staff, do they fit the result of this discussion? Can they be trained to do so? What other resource challenges does this bring to mind?

Tick tock.

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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: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Ten months of 2009 are gone. Take the pulse of your business and ask yourself: “Is the business where I wanted to be by now?”

Before you think this is all about the finances, it isn’t. It’s all about where you wanted to be. Maybe it’s about finances, but there might be more important indicators. It’s easy to be profitable and still heading in the wrong direction, for example.

If you’re behind, what can do add, change, delete, correct or adjust to get your progress back on track to meet/exceed your business’ goals? Have you actually done what you said you would do? If not, why not?

Not just about Retail

Big retail (and far too much of small retail) looks at these next two months as what gets them into the black. They’ve even named the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” because that’s the shopping day that traditionally moves their business into the black.

While many outside of retail often look at these next two months as throwaways due to the number of holidays, vacations, parties, travel, hunting season and so on – that’d be a mistake.

Likewise, lots of companies put off hiring during these two months (hmm, so NOW till January is the time to pick off the best talent?).

As for the delay, I can find a holiday and related excuses to do that in any month. Why would you do that?

Thank them

In a few weeks, Thanksgiving is coming up in the U.S.

What a great time to take a little time to thank your clientele for their business – just don’t be boring about it and don’t make it a sales call. Whatever you do, do it as a sincere thanks rather than making it ordinary and using it as just another opportunity to pitch everyone.

For Canadian readers who are thinking “Darn, our Thanksgiving was last month”, it’s not too late. Simply acknowledge that you’re a bit tardy so you thought you’d thank them in time for the Americans’ Thanksgiving.

2010

One last thing on this topic – now’s the time to get moving on an assessment of 2009’s successes and failures, and start laying out your 2010 plans and goals. Have your plans and strategies ready for Jan 1 (and start them earlier if it makes sense). Don’t wait until Jan 1 to start this process.

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What about in other markets that affect yours?

Ever want to know at least a little bit of what Google might be thinking?

This 5 minute excerpt is the meaty part of a 45 minute long discussion about the future with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Listen to what Schmidt says about the inevitable intersection of TV, radio, video, internet – ie: of media in general.

Sure, it’s obvious. And it’s just one aspect of what he’s speaking of.

But are you considering it in your marketing? In your product delivery? In what your products and services look like? In who you have on your staff, the skills you’re looking for in new hires and the training you’re offering to existing staff?

You don’t have to be in the tech business for this to have a profound impact on you. Has the iPod has affected businesses other than those who make cassette players? Surely.

What often separates the big dogs from everyone else is that they think ahead, they look ahead and they position themselves to be at cruising speed when that next big thing gets traction and hits cruise control.

Focusing merely on survival is not only a great way to never make it to top speed, but to find yourself on the wrong highway altogether.

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photo credit: mckaysavage

They just don’t know any better and they’re the ones Seth is talking about here.

They don’t know that you’re supposed to dominate your industry and they are supposed to respect your dominance just because your daddy or great-grandpappy started your business 50 or 100 years ago.

They don’t know that they are supposed to adhere to 2, 20, or 200 year old rules that rule your market for reasons no one can remember, much less explain.

All they know is…they can do it better. And without all your baggage.

That’ll be $40 for 2 bags, sir.

But…not all of them have that baggage. Some see past what everyone else is doing.

Like Toys ‘R Us. Yeah, a nationwide box store.

We’ve talked about how the CPSIA has dealt a tough hand to small lot, one-of-a-kind (OOAK) and handcrafted manufacturers of toys and childrens’ clothes (and a zillion other things for kids under 12).

Most of the noise has come from small businesses, even though the big stores have to deal with it too. They have some upside vs the little guy because their lot sizes are large and they can wield power with suppliers. (Or they’re like Mattel and get an exemption…but we won’t talk about that today)

Despite all the inane things that a lot of these big chains do, this one was different.

They were smart enough to do this.

Most big box stores don’t have the brass to do that.

Be different AND better

For example, when most big box office stores have a big sale whose volume is controlled by how much stuff you can cram into a sack, they exclude a bunch of stuff – usually expensive stuff. And they only let you have one bag.

Guess if I wanted to buy enough expensive stuff to fill 10 bags that might tick em off? I guess I’ll just get it somewhere else.

If they had a trade-in sale, they’d normally limit it to 1 item and require purchase from a specific list of replacement items.

Not Toys ‘R Us.  Their trade-in event appears to have no limits.

Just like those 3 kids who just decided to start a company…in your market.

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photo credit: William A. Franklin

This post discusses one of them: http://totusmel.blogspot.com/2009/07/communicate.html

Inconsistency is a good one, but…yours might be different.

I don’t mean your pet peeve, I mean that thing your business does to irritate your customers. Or those things. Multiple annoyances.

How often do you irritate a customer?

Daily. Hourly. Every other minute. Right now?

How many customers a day do you manage to tick off or at least mildly annoy?

What the heck are you thinking?

There’s a top secret, super-duper method for solving this problem. It takes years to gain the expertise to pull this off…or not.

The secret? Ask them.

They’ll be more than happy to tell you.

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photo credit: tm-tm

Earlier this week, Matt Mullenweg (whose software runs this blog) wrote a post about starting a bank.

BUT…it really wasn’t about starting a bank. Not if you look under the covers just a bit.

It was really about how to look at your market and stand out because you don’t do all of the stupid, annoying things that everyone else in your market thinks is OK.

And it was really about standing out in your market because you do all the things that other people are afraid to do, too lazy to do, too stupid to do (and so on).

You know, because it’s always been done that other way. The same way everyone else does it. Cuz that’s just how our industry does it.

Read the first 10-15 comments on that post. Look how many people resonate the thoughts about banks that do this and that and so on. EVERYONE knows those things. Matt didn’t invent them. He *did* have the nerve to suggest the he would do things differently.

What are you willing to do differently? Start by sacrificing your industry’s sacred cow.

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photo credit: lynn dombrowski

Not long ago, we were talking about being “… only as good as your last transaction.”

I was chatting with someone on Twitter yesterday and mentioned that “every job is a sales job”, which provoked a response from someone in Missoula who asked: “Even the garbage man?”

Abso-flippin’-lutely.

Tomorrow morning, my trash gets picked up. Watch carefully for a sales guy.

Garbage man “A” accidentally knocks over your trash cans with the fender on his truck.  He jumps out of the cab, tosses out a few pieces of creative language about knocking the cans over, empties them into the truck, leaves the trash that fell out right there on the ground where it fell, tosses the cans back into the driveway with a rattle that would wake the dead.

Because it’s 6am, it seems as if he’s trying to make as much noise as possible. On that theme, he revs up his truck as he pulls away, riling up our annoying little white fluffy dog who barks at everyone as if they are Satan incarnate, meanwhile waking up the granddaughter.

Garbage man “B” also knocks over the cans, but unlike his competitor, he stops and picks up the spill, empties the cans, sets them quietly at the edge of the driveway and pulls away at a normal pace without making a fuss.

Obviously, the sales guy is garbage dude “B”.

Leaking more than antifreeze

You might be leaking sales.

This morning, I’m off to the radiator shop. You know, cuz I feel like it’s my duty to put the children of the automotive industry through graduate school. Arrgh.

Think about the public-facing staff at a radiator shop when I visit for the first time.

If I walk in and they are professionally-dressed, what’s my thought? I don’t expect the guys to be in $1000 suits, but I also don’t expect them to look like they haven’t showered in days and smell like a bottle of rum, much less yesterday’s hay hauling sweat.

In particular, since I’m the first appointment of the day, I expect a little more. Still, if the guy takes care of me and my rig and doesn’t force me to refinance the Stimulus bill, I’ll probably cut the guy some slack.

Even so, everything impacts the sale. The appearance of your staff, your place of business, parking lot, even the smell.

The smell?

Oo-ooo-that-smell (apologies to the boys from Alabama)

Sure. Imagine you’re walking into an extended care center. Maybe umpteen years from now, a relative simply can’t be cared for at home for some technical reason that is beyond your abilities.

When you walk into the first center, the halls are crowded with unattended residents in wheelchairs. There’s nothing going on anywhere.

As you turn down the hall where the bedrooms are, the smell of urine hits you like a Nolan Ryan bean ball. Blammo, right up side your head.

Smelling salts, anyone?

Meanwhile, the family member who raised you, nursed your wounds, listened to you whine as they dabbed that evil Mercurochrome on those wimpy little cuts on your knees is going to be sentenced to a place that smells like the floor of an airport restroom?

Nope.

Your next visit is totally different. While there isn’t a Nerf football game going on in the lobby, the place smells and looks pristine and the folks are active. Even the ones who aren’t so mobile are being read to or listening to music, etc.

The people who make all these things happen have sales jobs, whether they are changing Depends and cleaning up your grandmother, answering the phone with a snarl or counting back change at Pamida.

Active vs. Passive

Beyond the passive salespeople that we’ve just talked about, there are others. Some of them are almost invisible sometimes – until they interact with your clientele:

• The shy, slightly geeky slide rule totin’ field engineer with the pocket protector with his name on it.
• The mechanic who comes out of the bay to tell me the horrible, expensive news.
• The bug killer guy who slides out from under your muddy crawl space to tell you about the yellow jacket infestation.
• The young kid who takes you out to see the boat you just rented and teaches them how not to sink it or blow yourself up.

None of them are who you think of when you do sales training, but they should be.

They’re like the recon Marine patrol. Front and center, making a first impression.

Train em. Don’t expect to create a platoon of Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins clones.

Instead, expect results after arming your folks with the tools to produce them.

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Competition. It isn’t good or bad, it just is.

You either are or you aren’t competitive. Thankfully, it’s something you might even be able to learn, at least somewhat.

On the other hand, it’s hard to teach the desire to drive the QB into the dirt and then stand over him. You just gotta.

Anyhow, on that theme, today’s guest post comes from a rather unusual place – a sports blog. More specifically, Dan Shanoff’s discussion about ESPN’s next entry into local sports coverage.

Filter all the sportiness out of it after reading it once and think about a similar entity entering your local market.

A big, powerful, deep pocketed player. In your market. In your town.

Whaddaya gonna do now?

Shanoff lays it out nicely for a paper. How about your business?

Are you going to wait till they arrive to take the next step? Not a good idea.

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photo credit: *Zara

I love surprises (good ones at least).

This week a vendor surprised me with a tshirt in the mail, something that happens on a regular basis.

Oddly enough, they almost never ask what size to send, assuming that an adult medium is the best choice. It isn’t. Doesn’t fit my son either, he’s a swimmer. My wife doesn’t wear t-shirts.

The net result of that decision is that the shirts go to one of two places: to my wife’s 6th grade class to live their life as a paint shirt, or directly to the local used clothing exchange.

Not a big deal, but if you think about how much these businesses spend to purchase, print on and mail these shirts out, you’d think they would want the recipient to wear them.

Why? In most cases, these companies are courting early adopters – what Malcolm Gladwell would call influencers.

They hope that (among other things) influencers and/or product champions will wear them and generate conversation about the product/company mentioned on the shirt. Word of mouth marketing is at least part of what they’re looking for.

If the shirt discussion goes viral, all the better.

On the other hand, if the shirt isn’t the right size, you just poured money down the drain, rather than accomplishing the desired effect.

Or is it a big deal?

One vendor, SocialMedian.com, actually emailed to ask what size shirt to send. That shirt got worn. I couldn’t tell you if it had any impact on their business, but I can tell you that it didn’t end up as a paint shirt for my wife’s 6th grade class.

This week’s shirt came with a card to explain the cryptic writing on the front. The symbols are very small, in fact from 50-100 ft away, some might think it is a plain black shirt. Without the card, I would have had no idea what the shirt was about.

Let me repeat that – you want to garner attention and you send a shirt that looks plain from a distance. Even if you are close, the shirt requires a *card* to help you remember what the hieroglyphics on the front actually mean.

Before you spend $15000 to send 1000 shirts out into your community, think about the minimum goals of this investment.

Goal #1: you want them to wear the shirt.

Goal #2: you want others to have some sort of clue what the shirt is about.

Kinda simple.

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photo credit: joiseyshowaa

There’s a story told during the early parts of Wood Badge for the 21st Century (a week-long leadership course for Scout leaders) about an old cathedral somewhere in the UK or Europe.

The story goes that the builders of this 700 year old building planned ahead for the maintenance of that building and a prime concern was replacing the beams in their building.

The beams in buildings of this period came from massive trees.

Presumably, the builders of the cathedral were concerned that future builders wouldn’t have the resources to maintain / repair the cathedral so they planted trees on the cathedral’s courtyard with the intent of using them in the future.

Or maybe they figured the cost would be beyond the budget of those doing the work.

Honestly, we don’t really know what drove their thought process, but it speaks well of them that they were thinking about it even during construction, despite it being so many years ago.

Naturally, the story continues with these massive trees on the property that are the only ones suitable for replacing beams in the building.

Similar stories can be found about the Tower of London’s trees, but no one is really sure if the trees were planted for this use or not.

Sharpen the chainsaw?

Now, we all know that you’d probably get strung up on one of those trees 700 years later if you proposed to cut them down to replace a failing beam in one of these structures, but that isn’t the point.

Nor is it the point that these days, engineered wood beams (made from laminated wood, resins and other products) would likely be the material of choice.

I hope it is obvious that the point of this discussion (and the reason it is used in the Wood Badge course) is the plan, the vision and the attention to detail in both.

Imagine if your business’ “What If” thought process didn’t end right after the New Year’s Eve party, but instead went 5, 10 or 25 years in advance?

If you’re thinking about your customers’ needs that far out, isn’t it more likely that your vision will be better than someone whose planning only considers what’s going on now – or maybe what might happen in the next year?

20/20

Are you strategic about something 5 years out? Or – like much of Wall Street – are you simply thinking 90-120 days in advance?

If you can see far into the future, obviously you would make better decisions now. Given that, how far forward are you looking?

Even if your vision of what your market will be and what your clients will need 10 years from now is inaccurate, that’s OK.

The process, research and examination of your market, your customers and your own business will yield much better short-term decision making than a short-term view would.

You’ll consider things you might never have considered, or you’ll do so far earlier than you would in an almost-reaction-driven (so-called) strategic mode that can’t even see over the next hill.

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photo credit: mhoey

Wednesday, MSNBC reported that John Barry, the former CEO of WD-40 company had recently passed on.

Normally, I don’t spend a lot of time reading obits, but something made me consume this one.

Perhaps it is because WD-40’s branding penetrated our culture so well. Just one indication: when my not so mechanically inclined wife wants something oiled, she says put some WD-40 on it.  Just yesterday, in fact.

Anyhow, I’m reading down through the article about his domain over this product and his company and more and more little signals stick out about how this guy truly understood his focus.

He knew he wasn’t in the oil business. A lot of folks wouldn’t get that. Too many, in fact.

You’ve had some good examples. You wont catch Starbucks management telling people they’re in the coffee business. That’s just one.

As I went down through the article, it just got better and better…. and then the quote:

“We may appear to be a manufacturing company,” Mr. Barry said to Forbes, “but in fact we are a marketing company.”

That is Mr. Barry’s parting gift to you. This is how you have to think of your business and now here’s a very successful CEO opening the curtain and confirming it.

The news piece is here.

I strongly suggest taking a few moments to read it and then consider what business you’re in.

Tech folks (programmers and the like): If this is where you start feeling slimy, get over it. Get way over it.

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Download audio file (BoatAnchorBadSharingGood.mp3)

photo credit: Robb North

Over the last month or so, I’ve been playing phone tag with someone at the local bank’s office.

I use this national bank primarily because they offer some electronic banking services that local banks don’t bother to offer (such as a real-time, seamless interface with QuickBooks), despite my repeated “encouragement” to do so.

Some have noted that the cost to provide this QuickBooks interface is substantial – yet I get interesting wrinkled brow looks when I remind them that I pay $15 a month to use this nifty QB service because it saves us hours per month. Until the fee got to the point where the time was more valuable, I’d pay it. But I digress…

Anyhow, we’ve been talking with someone there about a refi and a combination of my schedule / travel and her schedule /travel have made it difficult to get into the same room at the same time. Not their fault, just one of those things about a busy summer.

This last time I called, the person I’m working with was out of town for several days. I asked the person on the phone if they could put me on their appointment calendar for the week after they return.

My calendar! Mine, mine, mine!

Astoundingly, the answer was no.

Yes, the folks at this large national bank, the same ones who are advanced enough to have their accounts seamlessly talk to my QuickBooks, do not allow or cannot manage to let their employees see their appointment book or schedule an appointment for someone else.

Insane.

I have a feeling it might be related to worries that someone might raid someone else’s appointment calendar for plum prospects, but there are ways of showing only open dates. Even so, that shouldn’t be necessary.

If you can’t trust a *bank* employee to access a co-worker’s appointment calendar, tell me why you trust them to work at the bank in the first place – cuz I don’t see it. But that trust thing is a topic for another day.

Unseen Value

Now we get to the point where you see where this affects you and your business: Are there resources (like an appointment calendar) that your staff should be able to share so they can help each other serve your clientele?

Back in the photography software days, it was a huge deal for new users of our product to finally get off that paper calendar at the front desk. It allowed anyone to see which photographers / camera rooms / salespeople / presentation spaces were booked and make an appointment no matter where an employee was when they answered the phone.

Sounds completely obvious, but many businesses simply couldn’t do it because they were still tied to that boat anchor – the paper appointment book.

Big, heavy and “somewhere in the warehouse”

Another market I worked with manufactured expensive custom items that were big and heavy. They stored them in the warehouse once they were finished.

The information about the build status and storage location of these custom-ordered items was kept on a set of clipboards on a line of nails in the manufacturing area.

Sometimes the info on those clipboards was out of date or missing because someone forgot to write the build status or location down. An order might get lost / forgotten until a customer called for it – and then you might find out that it hadn’t been built yet.

Now imagine that you are a receptionist in the front office and you’re all alone over lunch hour or during a big sales meeting. When that big customer calls to ask about their 27 piece, $57000 order, you have to put them on hold (or tell them you’ll call back), run back to the clipboards, flip through the orders manually, find the order and run back to the phone.

If the clipboard is missing because someone has it at a manufacturing station, or it is on the manager’s desk (or car seat), you know nothing.

If the data on the clipboard wasn’t filled out, you get to run back to the warehouse and look on dozens of shelves from floor to ceiling for an item that has a little paper tag on it showing the customer name.

That’s a boat anchor.

The alternative? A system that integrates customer information, orders, build status and delivery information together. When the phone rings, you can look up all of a customer’s orders, find the status of any of them and tell them right then. The items are barcoded as part of the manufacturing process so most status and location info is automatically updated. Depending on your situation, “most” could be “all”.

What’s your boat anchor? What can you share to get rid of it, enabling your staff to be more helpful and more productive?

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Rather than weigh this down with words, I’ll let it speak for itself.

Good business is simple. Boil it down.

“…so that I can sell with confidence.”

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photo credit: Renneville

Imagine you’re talking with a prospect or client on the phone and right before the critical word or phrase that almost always closes the deal, you suddenly hang up.

You’d never do that, right? Would make it kinda hard to close the sale, don’t you think?

Thing is, your email, social media and website might be hanging up on prospects, albeit in a slightly different way.

Let’s talk about paying attention to some details you might not be watching. They’re details that might completely change the message you’re trying to get across to a client or prospect.

I’m talking about the repercussions of being just a tad too wordy.

Isn’t that funny? Yeah, I know I have zero room to talk on that. It’s an effort I have to stay focused on, so today I’ll show you why it’s important.

Twitter Cutoff

In Twitter,  your message can be 140 characters long.

BUT…if the message is more than 120 characters long and someone retweets it (sends it to their followers, which is very desirable for you), the characters past 120 are cut off as shown below.

See the … after “Jonathan Bu”? You’ve been snipped. Cut off.

If there’s part of a URL or some other important info at the end of your message, bummer.

If there’s anything there that’s critical to your message, you’re not a happy camper.

Outlook Cutoff

Outlook’s notification window shows approximately 30 characters of the title of your email. The number varies slightly because a proportional font is used in that window, meaning that some letters and numbers are wider than others.

I had my friend, mountain photographer and graphic artist Leroy Schulz send me 2 emails with totally different subjects. As you can see below, they look the same in the notification box.

Identical notifications, yet their messages are totally different: One says “Mark, Are you voting for Obama? You’d be crazy not to”, while the other says “Mark, Are you voting for Obama? I wouldn’t dream of it”.

How’d you like to make that mistake?

Sure, some people do it on purpose to provoke you to open the email, but are those the folks who gain your trust? I doubt it.

Likewise, at the default width, Outlook’s inbox shows you only a part of the email’s subject (see below).

As you can see above, having the subject cut off might cause a big problem, especially if someone doesn’t bother to read the email (like that ever happened).

The actual subject of the email above is “Dude, I caught your wife cheating last night at our weekly poker game.”

In fact, the cut off subject might just keep your email from getting read – and that’s what this is really about.

If your prospects and clients use some other email program, it’s bound to have similar limitations.

Google Cutoff

In Google results, page titles longer than 70 characters get cut off with a “…”.

This is the place where I get bit, because my blog post titles are occasionally too long.

Here’s an example:

In the example above, the title tag is too long (thus the … after “smart business moves”).

If the word after “moves” is important to finding your site, your prospect will never see it. For example, it might say “moves wisely to accept competitors’ cards” (which is what they did).

Sure, if the word is important, it should occur before that point if at all possible, but sometimes it isn’t.

Eliminating the … is the goal because you want the words in your title to be optimized for a) Google and b) those humans you want to see the title and be motivated to click on the link.

In each of these 3 cases, you typically want the truncated info to help answer the question that’s on their mind at that moment or provoke them to take an action.

Needless to say, “…” doesn’t even begin to do that.

Where are you getting cut off?

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photo credit: Ed-meister

The trouble with dragon slayers is that they aren’t sure what to do when the last dragon is gone.

Without vision, they’re completely lost, wandering in search of a dragon they heard of just over the next hill.

The good dragon slayers find a new species of dragon and slay those until those too are extinct. Over and over, they hop from dragon to dragon, making the best of the situation until they temporarily put themselves out of business.

The rest wander about, until they find a new, temporary home. Some get lucky and find something else.

Have you built a business that can survive the extinction of the dragon you currently slay?

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photo credit: Untitled blue

Today’s guest post comes from the folks over at BlackCoffee.com, and talks in some detail about what they call “Brand Revitalization”.

It’s an important read not only if you want to revitalize your brand, but if you want to keep it from getting stale in the first place.

As we often discuss here, part of being the only solution in the minds of your customers involves becoming the expert, getting closer to and knowing more about your customers, having a story, perpetual improvement, focus, communication and so on.

This piece from Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard sums it up nicely as long as you keep in mind that it isn’t just about revitalizing what they call a heritage brand.

It’s also about what you have to do in order to become one in your market.

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photo credit: hilectric

Today’s guest post is from ChrisG.com and is about a question from @starbucker…

What is so natural to you that it is like breathing?

What aspect of yourself, which behavior, skill, activity, talent, is so part of you that you could not imagine yourself without it?

That’s the key, it’s not just what you are good at, or what people expect of you – what do you do automatically, easily, and would do regardless?

Spend some time thinking about that and how it relates to your business. You may find a new product line, service or perhaps a whole ‘nother business inside yourself.

You might learn a few other things as well. Challenge yourself, don’t just go through the motions.

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