Blog

In Defense Of The Misunderstood Scrooge

December 22, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

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

December 14, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

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

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]