Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Archives for December 2021

How To Get Success To Come And Play In Your Backyard

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This is a “How to get your business off to a good start in the New Year” column, without any resolutions. You’re welcome.

It’s about fundamentals that have served businesses since proto-market was born when Og dropped his club and suggested to Gog that they do business instead of killing each other for what they wanted. If you’ll find a way to incorporate these ten fundamentals into your daily/weekly/monthly management practices this year, you’ll have more fun because success will come and play in your backyard. If you don’t, well, you know. [Continue Reading]

In Defense Of The Misunderstood Scrooge

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Some say I’m a scrooge. They might be right.

The following exhibits (excuses) are placed into evidence in my defense of this indictment:

A. The early part of my career was spent in retail. Retailers know what that job does to your holiday spirit. There’s a survivor syndrome for everything else, why not one for retail survivors? Let’s call it RPTHSS: Retail Post-Traumatic Holiday Shock Syndrome.

B. Since I don’t wait until the holidays to give someone a gift, I just don’t get all worked up about holiday giving. Not that the ladies mind getting stuff all year (let’s not lose our heads). It’s just that they want me to be giddy about giving at Christmastime. Giddy? Bah! Humbug!

C. As an avowed and devout contrarian, it would be antithetical for me to feel obligated to do what everyone else is doing. And if there’s one thing that has become part and parcel of the holiday season, it is obligation. For example:[Continue Reading]

Personal Service Businesses: Think Prices Not Wages

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Millions of small businesses sell personal services like consulting, website development, or janitorial services, instead of something tangible like a computer or a kumquat.

Unfortunately, pricing a service is not as intuitive as pricing a tangible product. Consequently, service businesses too often don’t charge enough to sustain themselves profitably because of how they think about what they sell to customers.

Don’t make the professionally fatal mistake of comparing what you charge customers to deliver your product – a service – to how much you would expect to make per hour as an employee. Doing so, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is like comparing lightning to a lightning bug. You must think like a business, not an employee. You have to think pricing, not wages. Here’s why: [Continue Reading]

Spring Cleaning For Small Business, In December, During A Pandemic

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Whether it’s a year where something we once knew as “normal” was part of our reality, or during an unprecedented and unimaginable year of a global pandemic, the abiding management question for all small business owners is always valid: “What’s the best use of my time right now?” And at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The twelfth calendar month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time, attention, and resources: The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible, while simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the football metaphor, but in the marketplace game your business plays all year, December is the two-minute drill of your fourth quarter. And in this tight transition period, that fierce competition for precious time and resources requires discipline and devotion to fundamentals.

Our grandmothers practiced the fundamental of spring cleaning when the weather broke warm. In the marketplace, in order to kick off the New Year right, your spring cleaning should happen before then. There are many targets of a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started. [Continue Reading]

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