Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Business Planning

The New Regular: There Will Be Many New Niches

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This is the 11th edition of my New Regular series, which is committed to helping Main Street businesses make the tenuous transition to a post-pandemic economy. Normal hasn’t been seen since corona was just a beer.

Do you like baklava – that pastry so luscious it’s served in little pieces? Who doesn’t? But what does baklava have to do with operating a business in a pandemic-induced panic? Well, as scrumptious as it is, the connection isn’t about how it tastes, but rather, how it’s made.

Cutting a baklava square in half reveals that it’s constructed of multiple layers of buttery, cinnamony, honey-drenched, walnut-laden sheets of phyllo dough baked into an elegant and rich eating experience.

Slicing into the marketplace you’ll see it looking increasingly like baklava: multiple layers of innovation-drenched effort baked into elegant choices and rich experiences. But zoom in closer. Just as each wafer-thin sheet of baked baklava breaks into more layers of cookie-inside-a-cookie, the marketplace stratifies into finer layers of even greater variations, nuances, and elegance.

Those finer layers are called niches. (My snooty friends say “neesh,” I prefer “nitch.” Tomato, to-mah-to). A niche is defined as being “perfectly suited for the person or thing in it.” And if there were ever two things perfectly suited for each other, it’s the niche and small business. It’s a beautiful thing to watch an entrepreneur discover a new niche and fill it, and later identify and fill a niche of that niche.

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The New Regular: The Power of Post-Pandemic Brainstorming

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This is the 10th edition of my New Regular series, which is committed to helping Main Street businesses make the tenuous transition to a post-pandemic economy. You can catch normal in a bit-part on the revival of PBS’s “Downton Abbey.”

Whatever your business looks like going forward, it won’t be what you used to call normal. The easy part is that, as the recovery plays out over the next year, what you’re supposed to be doing will be revealed to you by customers. The hard part will be making that transition personally and organizationally. In other words, getting out of your own way.

Since it’s likely that how you serve customers this December will be drastically different from how you did it last December, there’s no better way to “get out of your own way” than through brainstorming.  This is a leadership practice that helps shed hidebound baggage – “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it” – your business can no longer afford in the New Regular.

Brainstorming has always been powerful. But now that we’ve been keelhauled by the coronavirus shutdown, it’s essential. Plus, it’s the best way to get organizational creative juices flowing. And creativity is the mother’s milk of a powerful tool without which you cannot brainstorm: adjectives.

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Why, how and when to change your business’ DNA

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In nature, all life comes in two forms: plant and animal.

In the marketplace, all business entities are found in two forms: human and non-human. But unlike plants and animals, a human business can morph into a non-human entity.

A human business is a sole proprietorship or a partnership. Of the non-human species, there are three: C Corporation, Subchapter S Corporation (aka, Sub S, or S Corp) and the Limited Liability Company (LLC). All corporations begin as a C, and some, typically small businesses, “elect” to morph into the Sub S structure for reasons revealed in a minute. The LLC is the new kid on the block, only being available for about the past 30 years. It can be a very handy legal structure, but not for everyone.

So why should your human business morph to non-human? There are at least three excellent reasons:

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What is your small business exit strategy?

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In the United States, it’s very easy to start a small business. Maybe too easy.

If you remember those early startup days, then you’ll also remember that very soon the easy part ended. Indeed, from the moment you transitioned from your initial capital to needing to generate the Holy Grail of capital – profit from sales to customers – things started getting really hard. And over the next few years, maybe decades, if running and growing your business ever got a little easier, it was only because you figured out how to do it without killing yourself.

Then, one year you started tinkering with the idea of, you know, actually leaving your baby. Tossing the keys to someone else and riding off into the sunset. You know – retiring. And the more serious you got about the idea, the more you realized you were entering another phase of business ownership that’s also really hard – selling a business.

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Four business buying factors to keep in mind

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Continuing my series on buying a business, here are summaries of four critical factors to consider when acquiring a small business.  

Old sellers are the best sellers 

One of the best opportunities to acquire an existing business is when you can buy one from an owner who wants to retire from a business that’s still viable. Two good reasons are: They’re less likely to change their mind before the transaction is complete, and they’re more likely to finance a larger part of the sale price to get monthly income. 

Notice I said, “still viable.” Sometimes the end of the current owner’s career coincides with the end of the life of the business. Don’t buy a business that should retire with its owner.

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Buying a business? Consider these principles first

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Recently I wrote an article on how to “Buy Your American Dream” by buying a business from someone else. Let’s continue that theme with a few more principles to employ when considering this ownership option. Thanks to my friend, Russell Brown, and his book, “Laws of the Business Buying and Selling Jungle” for the inspiration.

Buyer beware – of himself.

In the securities industry, full disclosure is the coin of the realm. But in the marketplace, caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – is the fair warning standard.  If a seller misleads or misrepresents something, legal redress may be available. But business purchases that don’t work out are born more from inept buyers than from seller malfeasance. 

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