Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Ethics / Trust

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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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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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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The problems and perils of perfection

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There are a million – maybe a billion – scenarios for how someone becomes the Founder of a business. But regardless of variability, there is one part of every venture that, almost by definition, will not vary: In the beginning, and often for some time afterward, the Founder will be the first to do all the jobs.

If you’re one of those Founders, you were the first receptionist, the first salesperson, the first accountant, and the first janitor. But you didn’t become a business owner to answer the phone, pay the bills or sweep the floor. You did those jobs because, at that moment, you were the smallest of business entities. An entrepreneurial quark. A team of one.

You have every right to look back on those days with great pride. Starting a business from scratch and growing it into a success story is a modern-day Herculean feat, accomplished against all odds. But there is one perilous byproduct of the Founder being the first to do all the jobs – they were all done perfectly.

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Blockchain is here – are you ready?

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This is the first of a three-part series about a technology that’s likely to create a level of disruption, unlike anything we’ve seen. This article is to introduce the technology and put its disruptive implications in perspective. The next article will explain how the technology works. And the third will be about your likely first contact, and how you’ll use it in your business and life. First, some perspective.

Since the advent of the Digital Age, the number of business model disruptions brought on by new technology has been unprecedented in human history. Legacy paradigms – complete with red-letter rules and legendary success stories – have shifted dangerously for multi-generational industries. Think Kodak. Other examples include email’s impact on fax machines and the letter/parcel delivery industry; Airbnb hindering the hospitality industry without owning any real estate; and don’t ask a cabby about Uber unless you want to hear cursing.

There’s one thing all these disruptions have in common: The most breathtakingly-fast shifts of the past have been on a level that I call “next-step understanding.” Previously, when an innovation disrupted and possibly even surprised us, what we saw happening was next-step understandable. As dramatic as any innovation may have been – personal computer, Internet, e-commerce, social media, etc. – we took it in stride because it was a single unit of variation above where we were operating.

But, now it’s time to buckle up. What’s coming at you won’t be next-step – it will require what I call “quantum-leap understanding.” A quantum leap requires at least two steps – maybe more – at once. Understanding this next disruption won’t be like taking a course in Spanish or French. It will be more like learning Klingon. Almost maddening at first, it will seem like you’re passing through a wormhole into another dimension. Tech writer Adam Greenfield said this: “This is the first technology I’ve encountered that’s difficult for even the most intelligent and highly capable people to understand.”

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