Category Archives: Management

Six questions and answers on being a successful business owner

August 25, 2016 11:14 am ,

As many of you know, for almost 19 years I’ve conducted over 1,000 live interviews annually on my radio program, The Small Business Advocate Show. I get to ask four really smart people a lot of questions. But occasionally the tables are turned are turned on me, like when Alignable.com podcaster, Alan Belniak, asked me several questions about small business on his show. I thought you’d be interested in that interchange.

Belniak: What’s the biggest problem small business owners don’t know they have?

Blasingame: Too many business owners don’t realize that their customers’ expectations are changing faster than ever before.  If you want to find out what your business should be doing tomorrow or next year, that information is inside the heads of your prospects and customers. Ask them.

Belniak: What advice do you have for small business owners in order to make a successful new hire?

Blasingame: Focus on the 3Ps: Be more patient, professional and proactive. Don’t make a hiring mistake by rushing to fill a slot. Use professional methods and practices to increase your chances of making a successful hire. Be more proactive by grooming employees to step up to a key assignment, so that you’re hiring for the lower position.

Belniak: What advice can you give to those who are seeking funding?

Blasingame: Strategy and forecasting. Create a capitalization strategy that includes multiple capital sources and terms. Don’t use operating cash for long-term capital expenses. Don’t finance something you can lease. Don’t use investors when you should get a bank loan. Use an electronic spreadsheet to create a 12-month cash flow projection so you can forecast beginning and ending cash. This will make you smarter and your banker happier.

Belniak: What is one way that operating a business today is the same as 15 years ago, and one way it’s different?

Blasingame: It’s Old School fundamentals and New School tech. Old School: The fundamentals never change: you still have to buy low, sell high and keep good records; cash is still King; people still want to be treated well. New School is the digital elements, and most is good news: Small businesses have handy cool and affordable tools available, but it’s not good news if you’re not keeping up. You don’t have to win the digital race, but you do have to participate.

Belniak: What are some of the character traits common among successful entrepreneurs?

Blasingame: You have to have a high tolerance for risk. If you don’t, clock in tomorrow. You have to believe in yourself. Many days all other elements of your business will let you down. If you can’t believe in yourself, there will be days when you won’t come back. You have to love working. You’ll never work harder than when you own a business. If you don’t love working, clock in tomorrow.

Belniak: What’s one thing you see small business owners failing to do?

Blasingame: They fail to set aside time at least every week to stop being a manager and assume the role of the CEO. Fire yourself from jobs you no longer have to do and promote yourself to jobs that a growing company needs someone to perform, but that only you can do.

Write this on a rock … Being successful in small business isn’t complicated, but the degree of difficulty is hard to explain.

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Management

Three important people you want to be close to you

August 1, 2016 11:09 am ,

Why do birds suddenly appear
Every time you are near?
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you.

In 1970, the brother/sister act, The Carpenters, took these lyrics and the rest of the song, “Close To You” to the top of the charts. Velvet-voiced Karen sang lead, with brother Richard contributing lyrics and sweet harmony.

Out here on Main Street, small businesses should hum that tune every day to remind themselves about the three most important stakeholders they want to be close to.

Customers
Every business, large and small, longs to be close to its customers. But getting customers to return the favor is the challenge. Time was, when a business was a critical link to certain products and services for customers. Longing to be close to us, customers – and their loyalty – weren’t so illusive. Today, almost everything needed by customers can be purchased within a few miles of your business from competitors that didn’t exist when the Carpenters topped the charts. Throw in the Internet and e-commerce and what isn’t a commodity today?

The good news for Main Street is that small and nimble increasingly trumps big and strong. With few exceptions, we can’t compete with the big guys on price, selection, or brand intimidation. But we can make customers want to be close to us is by scratching an itch the big boxes can’t always reach: customization.

If you want customers to suddenly appear, find out what keeps them up at night. And don’t expect the answer to be a burning need for your product or service. If you deliver a customized solution, customers will long for your business because you added unique value they can use. And here’s the silver bullet of customer longing: Help your customers help their customers.

The other good news is that customization justifies higher margins than off-the-shelf offerings. If it’s truly focused on the customer’s solution, they’ll pay for it and come back for more.

Vendors
Once-upon-a-time, a vendor was a company from which you purchased inventory, raw materials, and operating supplies. Today, if a vendor isn’t longing to be your partner, you’ve got the wrong vendor.

Of course, we’re at once a customer to vendors and a vendor to customers. Consequently, we have to find vendor-partners as well as be one. In these roles, it’s important to understand a concept that has become part of the romance between 21st century vendors and customers: seamless.

In a world of outsourcing as a management strategy, the goal is not merely to reduce in-house staff. If outsourcing is to work, products and services MUST be delivered so seamlessly to us by our vendors, and by us to our customers, that operating efficiencies actually improve.

Small businesses have a greater opportunity today to accomplish the hand-in-glove level of closeness required for seamless delivery. And we can’t deliver seamlessly to customers unless vendors long to be seamlessly close to us.

Employees
Back when the Carpenters were belting out hits, the employer/employee relationship was based largely on the Dominator Management Model, which is to say, not much closeness. Employees longed for the perceived job security and benefits of a paternalistic employer. But in the 21st century, employees are drawn closer to leaders.

Today, employers must be able to show employees that we long for them. The best way to demonstrate our longing is to close the gap between what the company needs and what employees want. This means finding and keeping employees who become stakeholders.

If you want employees to long for you, you have to suddenly appear as a partner longing to support their professional and personal fulfillment. And no one can do this better than small business.

Write this on a rock … Find and keep customers, vendors, and employees who long to be close to you.

Posted in: Customer Care, Management

Defending your business against Big Boxes and Cyber-Boxes

July 1, 2016 11:06 am ,

Besides the traditional, local competitive landscape small business retailers must navigate every day, they also feel pressure from two other fronts to which they’re typically less adept at responding:

  1. The Big Boxes, anchored around the corner.
  2. Cyber-competitors, untethered in the Internet.

And pressure from the second one is increasing every day.

Here are a few ideas on how Main Street businesses can minimize the pressure from these two:

Big Box competitors
Let’s begin with these two truths:

  1. Unlike Big Boxes, a small business doesn’t have to conquer the world to be successful.
  2. The price war is over and you lost.

Your most qualified prospects and reliable customers are also the least likely to spend much time or money with a Big Box. The same feeling that attracts them to the customization and connection of your small business also causes them to be unimpressed by size and underwhelmed by poor service. Those who don’t fit this profile were never real prospects for you anyway; get over it – let them go. Your job is to re-enforce that “connection/customization” emotion by delivering value, not price, and quit trying to be something you’re not – big.

Online competitors
Those same customers just mentioned, who love your small business special sauce, still expect you to provide some level of online support. Your brick-and-mortar store doesn’t have to conquer the e-business world to keep customers happy, but you do have to show up online. Here’s what that means:

  1. Two words that reveal why you MUST have a professional presence online: local search. Prospects and customers use local search every day – especially on smart phones – to find companies and consider their offerings. Disregard the imperative of local search optimization at your peril. There are professionals who can help you with this – let them.
  2. Besides a regular website, yours must also be mobile-ready, including a hot phone link and directions. Nothing about your business’s past was mobile, but mobile will define your future.
  3. Prospects and customers increasingly expect businesses they like to connect with them with useful information, service announcements, and special offerings. There’s a reason the special offerings were listed last. “Connect” means by any means: email, text, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you aren’t asking prospects and customers for their electronic contact information, which platform they prefer, and then connect with them there, your business will suffer the slow death of irrelevance. And remember, some will still just want face-to-face.

You can compete against the Big Boxes by merely not trying to be like them. And regarding traditional best practices and the virtual world, remember this: it’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

Write this on a rock … You don’t have to conquer the world; just show up and be yourself.

Posted in: Management, Moment of Relevance, Sales

Are you asking the Outsourcing Power Question?

March 2, 2016 1:58 pm ,

Biutou Doumbia lives in a tiny village in Mali, in western Africa. She and her family live in poverty, very close to the line between survival and, well, you know.

Oh, one more thing: Biutou is a small business owner. She makes and sells peanut butter.

In Mali, as reported in a Wall Street Journal article, peanut butter is made the same way African women have made other staples for millennia: by grinding the seeds on a rock with a wooden pestle.

You might say Biutou’s operation is vertically integrated: She grows the peanuts, then manufactures, sells and distributes her product.

Over two centuries ago, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained how markets are made by the division of labor. And free markets created capitalism, which Ayn Rand called, “the Senegalonly system geared to the life of a rational being.”

Biutou doesn’t know Smith or Rand from a warthog – she’s illiterate. But she is one of Rand’s rational beings. And as such, she recognized the division-of-labor efficiencies offered by a diesel-powered grinder/blender when it became available. Now for 25¢ and a 10-minute wait, the sack of peanuts Biutou carries to the central grinding location turn into better peanut butter than she could make pounding all day with a pestle.

So Biutou now practices outsourcing, a division of labor process which is the employment of contractors to create efficiencies. Outsourcing is a valid business strategy, as is its opposite – you guessed it – insourcing, the process of removing vendor layers, usually to get closer to customers.

These two strategies are as different as chocolate and vanilla; but, like ice cream, choosing one doesn’t mean the other is wrong, just different. When Biutou practiced insourcing she didn’t have a choice. You have many choices; but are you choosing wisely?

One of the things every 21st century small business must do is focus on core competencies: what you do that makes your business valuable to customers.  Everything else, theoretically, can be performed by a specialist in your non-core activity.

Take a look at your own operation to see if – like Biutou – you can find efficiencies and recover time through outsourcing. Ask yourself and your staff Blasingame’s Outsourcing Power Question: Must this task be done in-house? The answer will come from these three questions:

• How much control do we lose, and can we live with it?

• What impact will our decision have on customers?

• How much of not using outsourcing is about ego?

Remember, any decision to employ outsourcing – or not – should be driven by the desire to seek efficiencies and improve customer service.

Write this on a rock … Blasingame’s Outsourcing Power Question: Must this task be done in-house?

Posted in: Management, Outsourcing , Tagged:

Sustain Outrageous Success with the Golden Triplets

October 26, 2015 1:50 pm ,

Once upon a time, consumers enjoyed what I call The Golden Age of Customer Service. Alas, based on current research, we now appear to be in the Plastic Age of Customer Unservice.

The most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index revealed three sad facts: 1) a steady satisfaction decline in the past year; 2) the lowest level of satisfaction in almost a decade; and 3) the current level is lower than 25 years ago.

So why has such a level of unservice become so sustainable? Because customers are sensitized to what I call the Plastic Triplets: High volume, low price and poor service.

For small businesses, the Plastic Triplets represent both opportunity and danger. But seizing the former while avoiding the latter requires the understanding that rarely do the high volume, low price siblings appear without bringing along their triplet, poor service.

The danger of high volume is it’s almost always associated with a price war. This will be on the test: The price war is over and small business lost. And low prices are great for customers, but not for any business from which quality service is expected.

Nothing that has happened in the past 30 years has changed how humans want to be treated, only

how they expect to be treated. Armed with this understanding, all a small business has to do to prove it isn’t plastic is to reverse the order of the triplets and rename them. Meet the Golden Triplets.

1. Excellent service. This is serving customers in a way that’s not only reliable, but also innovative and, most importantly, relevant. When service is excellent, the first thing you may notice is customers act surprised, because remember, humans still want excellent service, they’re just not used to it.

2. Premium prices. This is the mother’s milk of a small business because it delivers success sustaining higher margins. If you’re delivering value and aren’t charging for it, that probably means you’ve joined a price war, and you know what we’ve said about price wars.

3. Targeted volume. As a small business, you not only don’t want to do business with everyone, you can’t. So you have to target only those customers who want more than just price. They want customization, dependability, technical assistance and one more thing: They want you to save them time because, more people are valuing their time more than their money.

In the Age of the Customer, the key to sustained success is delivering the Golden Triplets with relevance to just those customers who are willing to pay for the special sauce of your small business.

Write this on a rock … Create your own Golden Age of Customer Service – and outrageous success – by staying focused on the Golden Triplets.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Business Ownership, Management

Why trust is a best business practice

October 19, 2015 2:16 pm ,

Are you familiar with the term “dysfunctional family?”

The simple definition is, a family whose members don’t work and play well with each other. Such relationships typically create emotional, mental, sometimes even physical distress, and/or estrangement.

Sadly, we humans also create dysfunctional businesses. Perhaps this definition will sound familiar: A dysfunctional company is one whose teams don’t work and play well with each other. Such relationships typically create emotional, mental, sometimes even physical distress, and a casualty list.

Someone once said, “Friends we choose – family we’re stuck with.”  Since we get to choose where we work and who we hire, why are there dysfunctional businesses?

The answer is actually quite simple, and it’s the common denominator in both businesses and families: human beings. If your family, or company, is dysfunctional, it’s because of the behavior of the humans.

Humans aren’t inherently bad, but we are inherently self-absorbed. And one of the by-products of self-absorption is self-preservation. When self-preservation shields are up, mistrust flourishes, goals go unmet, and failure is likely. When shields are down, productivity, creativity, and organizational well-being are evident. But the latter only happens if the stakeholders believe there is a basis for trust.

If your organization is not accomplishing its goals and making progress, look around to see if there’s more self-preservation going on than teamwork. Where evidence of individual and departmental self-preservation is found, you’ll also find lots of dysfunction, but not much trust.

In his book, “Built On Trust,” my friend, Arky Ciancutti, goes so far as to say that trust is “…one of the most powerful forces on earth.” He further states that the two most powerful trust-building tools are closure and commitment.

Closure is implied when there is a promise to deliver by a stated time. It manifests when performance happens or, in the alternative, a progress report is delivered in advance of the date.

Commitment, Arky says, “is a condition of no conditions.” When the relationship between two parties is built on trust, there are no hidden agendas. And while commitment may not always deliver the end product, it does guarantee a report about the progress.

Even though closure and commitment are skills that often must be learned, you’ll find willing participants in your employees, because human beings desire trust.  If your organizational culture isn’t built on trust, it’s not the employees’ fault. Trust and dysfunction have one key thing in common: they’re gravity fed. They start at the top and roll downhill.

Humans perform better in organizations built on trust.  Knowing this, successful managers demonstrate trust-building behavior and instill it in others as not only the right thing to do, but as a business best practice.

 

Write this on a rock — If organizational dysfunction is a poison, trust is its antidote.

Jim Blasingame is author of the award-winning book, The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Business Ownership, Entrepreneurship, Management , Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Blasingame Translator for Small Businesses and Banks

May 12, 2015 9:32 am ,

Once upon a time, a storm caused two ships to sink in the same area. All on board were lost at sea, save one from each ship, and those poor souls were alive only because they swam to a small island nearby.

As luck would have it, the two men hauled themselves up on the beach at the same time and within sight of each other. But survivor’s elation soon became pensive as they realized that each spoke a language unknown to the other.

Immediately both men had the same unspoken thought, “I don’t know this man or the language he speaks, but if we’re going to survive, we have to find a way to communicate and work together.”

In many ways, this tale actually plays out every day. But instead of on the high seas, our story takes place in the marketplace. And instead of mythical shipwreck survivors, our real life players are small business owners and bankers.

Female banker sat with investor

Like the survivors in the first story, the excitement of the latter-day castaways about their future prospects turns pensive when they both realize that: 1) they need each other in order to be successful; and 2) they don’t speak each other’s language very well, if at all.

With so much common interest and so little mutual understanding, can these two create a successful survival story?  Absolutely, but only if they have The Blasingame Official Translator for Bankers & Small Business Owners. Here are a few examples of how The Blasingame Translator works.

For small businesses to understand banker, they must:

  1.  Identify their banker as a success partner and their business’ best friend.
  2. Stay close to their banker when things are going well, and even closer when things aren’t going so well.
  3. Believe that an uninformed banker is a scared banker, and a scared banker cannot, and will not, behave like a partner.
  4. Pay attention to what motivates and impresses a banker, like attention to detail.
  5. Understand pertinent bank rules and regulations, so you don’t ask for something that can’t be done.
  6. Reward banker loyalty with small business loyalty.

For bankers to speak small business, they must:

  1.  Understand Blasingame’s 1st Law of Small Business: Starting a small business is easy, operating a successful one is not.
  2. Understand Blasingame’s 2nd Law of Small Business: It’s redundant to say, “undercapitalized small business.”
  3. Understand Blasingame’s 3rd Law of Small Business: A small business is not a little big business.
  4. Explain bank rules and regulations, and recommend services and products.
  5. In the credit scoring process, always find a way to give small business owners credit for character, past performance and best efforts.
  6. Reward small business loyalty with banker loyalty.

Write this on a rock … To avoid becoming marketplace castaways, small business owners and bankers must speak each other’s language.

Jim Blasingame is the author of the award-winning book, “The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.”

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Banking, Business Ownership, Management , Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Converting to a new kind of quality in the Age of the Customer

July 9, 2014 3:59 pm ,

Successful customer service is the process of delivering value to a customer in exchange for payment.

Surely this is the prime directive of any business.

But this process isn’t truly successful unless the relationship can be sustained; and only quality produces sustainability.

“Quality service” is a 20th century term businesses use to declare a commitment to diligent customer support. But customers typically associate it with, and businesses too often tolerate it as, promptly addressing a problem. Here’s what quality service might sounds like:

“We’re sorry that part was the wrong size. But we’re committed to quality service, so one of our trucks will be there in an hour with a new part.”

In most cases, quality service impresses the customer. But while prompt attention is admirable, it’s not optimal because it has a negative impact on sustainability in at least two ways:

QualityDefinition1) The customer was inconvenienced by inaccurate service;

2) fixing an avoidable problem is the worst kind of profit-eating inefficiency.

In the 21st century, successful small business customer service requires converting “quality service” to the quality process.

Executing a quality process, put simply, is serving customers right the first time. Accomplishing a quality process ranges from the very basic – accurate order filling, to the more complex plan of integrating into your operation only those vendors that share your quality process commitment.

The optimal goal of your quality process is sustainability through profitable customer relationships. This is accomplished when customers return to find your profitable business is still there, ready to serve them successfully – again.

Cash is king because the impact of negative cash on a business will take your breath away. And profit is queen only because the manifestation of negative profit takes longer than negative cash, which is the reason why quality service is even tolerated as a business practice.

When you’re ready to stop tolerating profit-eating quality service and convert to the profit-making quality process, here’s a good a place to start: Leslie Kossoff’s book Managing for Quality just out now in the new 21st century edition, in hard-copy and e-formats.

Remember, the quality service you’re so proud of may be admirable, but when delivered in response to something that was avoidable, it assaults profitability, threatens sustainability and, therefore, ultimately could put you out of business.

Write this on a rock… Convert quality service into the more profitable – and sustainable – quality process.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Management , Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Who made a difference in your life?

April 18, 2014 8:00 am ,

The following quizzes, and the subsequent paragraph, are attributed to the late Charles Schultz, creator of the comic strip, Peanuts. I’m passing along his thoughts because I think it’s important that we realize what is really important in life.

Quiz 1:
1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America contest.
4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.
6. Name the last decade’s World Series winners.

Quiz 2:
1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.
2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.
3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.
4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.
5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.
6. Name half a dozen heroes whose stories have inspired you.

“The applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners. The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones who cared.” – Charles Schultz

This is Jim again. As we go through life, let’s make sure our goals and priorities include caring about and serving other people, not just about other things.

Posted in: Management

The greatest challenges of small business owners today

April 14, 2014 8:00 am ,

Ask any small business owner how business is and even those who honestly report, “It’s great!” will also likely say, “But we can always use more.”

Knowing this about the heroes of Main Street, to find out what’s really going on you have to ask the way we did recently in our online poll: “What’s the greatest challenge for your business right now?” Below are five options we provided, the responses, and my thoughts.

It was surprising to learn that less than 10% reported “Finding qualified people” was their big concern, which was down from past surveys. Some sources estimate there may be 4 million positions going wanting for qualified candidates, so my speculation is that this change has more to do with the economy than talent supply.

And it was interesting that less than 10% of our sample were troubled by Obamacare impacting their HR strategy, also down from past polls. Perhaps the fear factor has diminished since the president delayed the employer mandate to 2015. We’ll see if this response changes next year.

According to Dr. Bill Dunkleberg, Chief Economist for the NFIB, who’s polled small business owners for 40 years, their single greatest concern over this period has been taxes and regulations. But when we offered this option in our poll, only one-fourth of our folks chose it. Since taxes and regulations have actually increased in the past five years, the next response represents what it took to knock these perennial pains off the top.

The big number in our poll came in at 58% for, “We need more sales.” This response has to be juxtaposed over another response we’ve received for the past five years, which is that consistently three-quarters of small businesses feel they’re operating in a stagnant economy. At this stage of a recovery, the economy should be growing at 4%. But when you see this response from the sector that creates over half of U.S. GDP, it’s not difficult to understand why the economy has barely averaged 2% growth per year.

Response to the next option supports the previous one. Only 3% said, “We need a bank loan.” For five years small businesses that survived the Great Recession did so by de-leveraging and learning how to operate more efficiently. Bank loans are the primary source of small business growth capital, but when the economy isn’t growing so goes business loans.

Wall Street, once the leading indicator of the economy is now merely a leading indicator of itself. The new leading economic indicator is Main Street. If you want the economy to grow, create conditions that foster small business growth

If the economy is the chicken, small business is the egg.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Management