Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist
The hardest job in the marketplace is the Chief Executive Officer of a small business.
So, how could it be harder to be the CEO of Excel Supply, LLC than the CEO of Exxon? Let’s look at the definition.
Investopedia says a CEO is “the highest-ranking executive in a company whose main responsibilities include developing and implementing high-level strategies, making major decisions, and managing overall operations and resources.”
First, let’s establish two maxims: one classic, one new.
Classic: The cardinal rule of customer acquisition – it’s not your customer’s job to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s yours.
New: Every year your website becomes less of a destination and more of a distribution center – develop a strategy that doesn’t depend upon prospects and customers returning to your homepage every time they need/want something from you.
It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one – everybody knows that. The bad news is, with all of the mega-corp algorithms, online competitors, and cyber-clutter, keeping the attention of even our most loyal patrons is getting harder every day. But here’s the good news: For every example of how technology makes business more complicated, there is a corresponding tool or application that increases efficiency and productivity. Even for small businesses.
One prime example of how to stay on the radar screen of people who already know you – users, prospects, customers – is to practice what I call the “Follow me home” strategy.
It’s been 209 years since the birth of one of the most famous people in history. It’s very likely that people in every developed country on the planet have heard the name Abraham Lincoln, even if they don’t know why.
As the 16th president of the United States of America, it’s generally accepted that Lincoln’s leadership genius made possible the ultimate resolution of one of the greatest conflicts in human history, the American Civil War. And as harsh, prolonged and contentious as that post-war “Reconstruction” was, it resulted in the successful reassembly of the United States, sans slavery. So when you combine all of this with the blessing that the re-United States became to the world for the past century and a half, it isn’t a leap of logic to recognize Lincoln as one of the top two or three individuals in the history of Western Civilization.
Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization. Of course, both have their dark side, too.
Greed is positive and productive when channeled toward personal and professional improvement. But it turns ugly in pursuit of a single-minded or selfish outcome. When fear delivers important information it’s not only useful, it’s essential. But it can also morph into paranoia, or cause inaction.
As I’ve discussed recently in this space, at this very moment, the nature of fear and greed is changing. For 10,000 years, the only form humans have known is analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound.
[Continue Reading]