Jumpstart Your Business

Many a business of yesteryear has come, flourished for a time and gone because they focused on pushing a product down the customer’s throat without paying attention to the needs and wants of the customer. The customer needs changed with time, sometimes because of technology, and the business failed to understand that. Railroad companies did not pay attention to the advent of the airplane and failed to comprehend that their business was transportation. Newspapers failed to understand that with the advent of the web, news was much more available for reading in real time and the customer did not have to wait for the printed articles and they are now a dying breed. They failed to acknowledge that they were in the information and not the advertising business.

There is another phenomenon occurring and an entire industry is again failing to understand the changes that are happening in the customer environment. The customer is now actively involved in the creation of information and entertainment at the same time because of the the capabilities of social media. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr are allowing the customer to become involved in realtime in creating information and to a great extent their entertainment and now no longer are forced to sit and stare at a television set taking whatever programming is being dished out to them. Now they are literally involved in the programming of their own entertainment in real time by tweeting or posting on Facebook or the other social media sites.

All of your life you have been told to learn to think outside the box. All through school you have been taught to think outside the box and now comes this idiot who says the time has come to think inside the box. When did he arrive from Pluto or was it Uranus?

The Wikipedia definition of the term “Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel, creative and smart thinking.” Thinking outside the box inspires our creative juices and gets us looking at all the different possibilities that lay around us. It makes us look at all the options and then some, before we choose the strategic path upon which to tread.

Click on this picture to donate to the Red Cross for Haiti Relief

. . . Or, tell us, if you were given the opportunity, what kind of small business you would start up in Haiti when the rebuilding begins and the most important thing you’d do to ensure that your business can recover from a disaster like this. We’ll donate $1.00 for every comment we receive to this post.

This too shall pass!

As a small business in this tough economic climate, you need a change in your attitude. Here is what is happening to you and your bsuiness:

Your clients are coming just to look see and now want it free
Cause they got little money,to spend on inventory,
This makes your A/R stink, and your bank account shrink,
Your inventories swell, your sales look like hell
And your business is drooping, your profits went pooping!

So here is your change in attitude:

So, the Great Recession is here at last
Well, tell this recession to kiss your —!!!

Understanding your limitations or what you are not proficient at, lets you focus on those things that you’re good at and by so doing helps you channel your energy to get the best results.

Looking ahead as opposed to always being absorbed with the past lets you chart new courses in life. If the great explorers had been satisfied with reliving their history we would not have discovered the new world. History is good for giving us a frame of reference for our future exploits. The past is simply a milestone against which future progress is to be measured.

A leader is someone who has a vision, makes a set of rules and takes off on a journey to make the vision a reality and people follow in his/her footsteps and leave a lot of breakage behind that others have to clean up.
:
A manager is simply someone who makes sure that people use a set of rules to accomplish someone else’s vision. He/she is like a referee in a game, they make sure that the game is played according to the rules regardless of the fact that the environment may be changing and the rules need to be tweaked

Here is a slightly different look at these two different functions in a business:

Work done by Porter, Lorsch and Nohria, reported in the October 2004 Harvard Business Review found that seven surprises await the new CEO and “Surprise Four” is “You Are Always Sending A Message.”

A new generation of employees wants something more from business leaders than simply increased stock holdings so when the turn comes they will be able to attain great wealth. They want to be able to make an impact right now – outside the corporate walls – keeping the business engaged in the local community.

Business culture thrives when clear communication is a practiced core value. That value becomes real when each person at every level embraces clarity – with customers; with suppliers; and, with each other.

The small business must support communication with civility but without fear, allowing challenges to the way “things are done.” Effective leadership in this positive culture is about keeping the “air clear.”

We are told that what we think about or ponder will define us. The “heart” is where feelings, behavior, attitudes, hidden thoughts live.

The businessperson, while realistic about cash flow issues and the shrinking customer base, must guard against “the negative” dominating thinking. Easy to do when business life is tough.