Blog

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

December 7, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

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]

Business Planning Will Always Be Relevant To Success

November 29, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

First, The Age of the Customer disrupted and made obsolete many older practices. More recently, a global pandemic – and our response to it – reset our businesses and the marketplace even more. But neither of these diminished, replaced, or made obsolete the requirement for business planning, especially cash flow.

A business plan is the result of thinking, researching, strategizing, and reaching conclusions about how to pursue opportunities. It may exist only in the head of the planner, but it’s better when written down.

Whether elaborate or simple, a written business plan is an assembly of facts, ideas, assumptions, and projections about the future. Here are three ways to use a written plan: [Continue Reading]

When Cause And Effect Converged With Humanity

November 22, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

This is a story about how cause and effect merged parallel universes and one person made a difference that changed the course of human history.

As the 17th Century dawned on the New World, a manchild was born to the Patuxet tribe. His father named him Tisquantum. They were part of a confederation of tribes known as the Wampanoag (“eastern people”) inhabiting much of what became known as New England.

In time, Tisquantum would become a very important individual to the future of America, but not before his life would change in ways not to be imagined by any 17th-century Earthling. [Continue Reading]

Age of the Customer Prospecting Rules for the Age of the Pandemic

November 15, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

Since 1993, control of the three major elements of your customer relationships – product, information, and buying decision – has shifted from your business to your customer. This marketplace transition is, by definition, a Biblical proportion paradigm shift from the original, 10,000-year-old Age of the Seller, to the new Age of the Customer.

This shift has created many disruptions across the marketplace, but none more than to the discipline of professional selling. More specifically, the element that has been disrupted most is business-to-business prospecting.

If your sales effort isn’t getting the job done, it’s probably not because your sales team isn’t working hard enough or has forgotten how to close – a process that has not been disrupted. It’s because the rules of prospecting have been turned upside-down. Here are four facets to this prospecting shift: [Continue Reading]

On Veteran’s Day, We Should Recognize All Who Served

November 11, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

Veterans Day, as we know it, has its origins in Armistice Day.

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”

That was the 1919 acknowledgment by President Wilson on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI “in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

Congress made Armistice Day a federal holiday on November 11, 1938.

But after World War II, Alvin King, a small business owner in Emporia, Kansas, had a problem with the narrowness of those honored on Armistice Day. Al was so moved by the death of his nephew, John E. Cooper, who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, that he and the Emporia Chamber of Commerce started a movement to redefine Armistice Day and give it a new name – Veterans Day. [Continue Reading]

Small Business Survival Lessons From Jeff Foxworthy

November 1, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

You’ve no doubt seen the classic Jeff Foxworthy act, the one where he says, for example, “If you have more than one car jacked up in your front yard, you might be a redneck.”

Just as Jeff got rich delivering this comedic routine, you can benefit from his cause-and-effect logic by applying it to your small business. Except unlike Foxworthy, it won’t be funny if you resemble too many of these one-liners. In fact, your business might not make it. Or as comedians say, you’ll bomb. [Continue Reading]