Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Spring cleaning for small business – in December

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“What’s the best use of my time right now?” is the abiding management question out here on Main Street. But at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The reason is because the twelfth month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time and resources: 1) The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible; while 2) simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the sports 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.

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When cause-and-effect met humanity

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This is Jim’s traditional Thanksgiving column.

As the 17th century dawned, cause-and-effect was merging two parallel universes.

In the Old World, a group of Leiden Separatists was making decisions that would put them on a circuitous journey. Meanwhile, in the New World, a manchild named Tisquantum was born to the Patuxet tribe of the Wampanoag Indians.

Both the Separatists and Tisquantum became very important to the future of mankind, but not before their lives would change and intertwine in ways not to be imagined by the inhabitants of either world.

In search of religious freedom, the Separatists crisscrossed Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean. On their odyssey, these unlikely explorers would steel their convictions, which would prove handy in the New World.

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Relevance – the Customer’s new prime expectation

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When describing what influences the behavior of individuals as they pursue their lives, you would likely include concepts associated with goals, plans, passion, desire, ego, personality, etc. In matters of human interaction as we meet, love, and work together, there is often an abiding struggle between my passion and your ego, for example, or your goals and my plans. Indeed, successful long-term personal relationships are heavily weighted on my tolerance of you today and your forbearance of me tomorrow. Give and take. And the world goes round.

But in the marketplace, affection and sentiment give way to contracts and performance, because tolerance and forbearance are always subjective, often inefficient, and sometimes unproductive. Consequently, a very powerful concept developed over the millennia that is the nucleus of how marketplace participants minimize conflict and find common ground. In classically efficient marketplace style, I’ve reduced this concept to one word: expectations.

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On Veterans Day, and every day, let’s recognize all who served

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Veterans Day has its origins in Armistice Day, which was first acknowledged by President Wilson in 1919. The first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles took place “in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Congress made Armistice Day a national holiday on November 11, 1938.

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, along with the Emporia Chamber of Commerce, started a movement to rename and redefine Armistice Day as Veterans Day. His goal was to expand recognition beyond military veterans who served in WWI. The idea caught on and President Eisenhower made Veterans Day official in 1954.

But who is a veteran? Having a lot of money at stake in the definition of military veteran, since it comes with the eligibility of benefits, the government sticks to a narrow one: someone who served on active duty for more than six months, while assigned to a regular U.S. armed services unit. Unfortunately, this version omits the service of most of the members of the National Guard and Reserves.

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Will small business decide the presidential election – again?

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Three years ago this week one of the most prominent markers of the 240-year American experiment took place: A national election to choose a new leader of the Executive Branch. Since then, a terabyte of words has been written and spoken – often apoplectically – about the Constitutional result of that election: Donald Trump.

Today, on the penultimate threshold of our 2020 quadrennial, let’s consider an oft-overlooked voting bloc that had – and likely will have again – a significant say in the next electoral outcome. I’m talking about America’s small businesses, of which the SBA reports there are over 30 million. Six million are employers who make payroll for over 60 million employees. The rest are marketplace quarks – the smallest business entity – solopreneurs.

Mathy alert. Here’s an electoral calculation rarely contemplated by most people or pundits: Add the first and third of the foregoing numbers and you get 90 million. Allow me to re-state that in context: Ninety million voters. Now add to that sum their voting age dependents – spouses and children – and the small business electoral critical mass easily grows to well over 100 million of America’s 245 million eligible voters. Let’s call that small business cohort “the stakeholders,” because regardless of how they vote, each one has a stake in the future of a small business.

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Intangible motivation produces tangible results

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Imagine that your best employee just resigned. How much will it cost – directly and indirectly – to find, hire, train and get a replacement to the productivity level of your exiting employee? You already know the answer: maybe years. Not a scenario you want to contemplate, right?

There are many reasons why someone leaves a job, but decades of exit interview records show that compensation is almost never the main reason. Consequently, it’s an article of faith that employees don’t leave companies they leave people – usually a manager. That means that such a disruptive circumstance is likely not only preventable, but the solution is essentially one of those intangibles that cost you little to nothing. Often, just some of your time and attention.

Motivation is one of those intangibles, and smart business owners know about its power. They’ve experienced the direct link between motivating employees to be successful in their assignments and the success of their business.

You can become one of those smart managers before a key employee turns in their keys because he or she merely couldn’t come up with a reason to be motivated to stay. Consider these six motivational best practices.

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