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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]

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]

Small Business Survival Lessons From Jeff Foxworthy

November 1, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

You’ve no doubt seen the classic Jeff Foxworthy act, the one where he says, for example, “If you have more than one car jacked up in your front yard, you might be a redneck.”

Just as Jeff got rich delivering this comedic routine, you can benefit from his cause-and-effect logic by applying it to your small business. Except unlike Foxworthy, it won’t be funny if you resemble too many of these one-liners. In fact, your business might not make it. Or as comedians say, you’ll bomb. [Continue Reading]

Six Marketplace Motivators Besides Fear And Greed

October 25, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

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 has been analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound.

But today, we’re fully across the digital Rubicon and there’s no turning back. In this new universe, fear and greed are being leveraged with a force that moves at the speed of light. And the new rules of this paradigm shift – transitioning from analog rpm to digital GHz – are putting pressure on our ability to keep up, armed only with ancient analog ethics.

But fear and greed are not our only productive motivators. In fact, six others not only contributed to human development alongside fear and greed all those years but have also had a more consistently positive impact on the marketplace. [Continue Reading]

Naisbitt’s Razor: The Great Small Business Advantage

October 18, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dial-up over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth-generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

But perhaps what caused mobile computing to make a quantum leap is found in this slogan: “There’s an app for that.” Anyone with access to paved roads and/or electricity knows this refers to an application that converts content otherwise consumed with a browser on a PC, to a hand-held device, like a smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps have proliferated because they’re almost always handier – and sexier – than their website counterparts.

A generation before my broadband prognostication, a real prophet, John Naisbitt, published his landmark book, Megatrends (Warner Books, 1982), in which he prophesied, “The more high tech we have, the more high touch we will want.” I’ve termed that quote, “Naisbitt’s Razor,” and it foresaw a kind of unlikely equilibrium between digital technology and analog humanity. This will be on the test: For a small business to find success in The Age of the Customer, Naisbitt’s Razor must be at the heart of your business strategy.[Continue Reading]

Make Tough Decisions By Seeking Excellence, Not Perfection

October 12, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

If you don’t like making decisions, small business ownership will not be your cup of tea.

If just the thought of having to choose between two undesirable alternatives gives you a headache, don’t quit your job.

If you obsess about which direction to take because you know you’ll have to live with any mistake you make, be sure to clock in tomorrow and thank your employer for the job.

Clearly, making decisions is easier for some than others, and it’s human nature to put off hard decisions. But there’s nothing easy about being a business owner, including having to make lots of decisions that are difficult, frightening, and sometimes even professionally and financially perilous.

Not only do business owners have to make many decisions, but in his book, Tough Management, my friend Chuck Martin proposes that one of the seven principles of effective management is the ability to actually force tough decisions; to cultivate a management practice that gets the toughest decisions right out front and dealt with as soon as possible.

But in his research, Martin discovered that the difference between what management thought they were doing with regard to effective decision-making, and what their subordinates felt their bosses were doing, made it look like these two groups weren’t watching the same ballgame. [Continue Reading]