success

Spring Cleaning For Small Business? Yes! In December!

December 12, 2023 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 fundamentals 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 for a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started.[Continue Reading]

Intangible Motivation Produces Tangible Results

November 7, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

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 seldom 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.[Continue Reading]

Five Financial Mysteries Revealed, Part III

October 24, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This is the last of a three-part series covering what I call The Five Financial Mysteries. In the first two articles, the first three Mysteries were revealed about the relationship between cash, accounting, and profit.

In this article, I’ll complete my attempt to help you stay on the right side of the business survival/failure statistics. So, buckle up as I reveal Financial Mysteries Four and Five.

Financial Mystery Number Four

You can get squeezed between vendors and customers.

Vendors and customers are the prime entities every business deals with financially every day the business is open. Understanding your relationship between these two, (literally between, because your business is in the middle), is the key to cash flow management. The way to avoid getting squeezed is [Continue Reading]

Mastering The Sales Discipline To Shut Up

September 21, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

Contrary to what you’ve heard, selling is the oldest profession, because “In the beginning” the serpent sold the apple to Eve. Everybody knows that. You might say she bought wholesale and then sold the apple retail to Adam. And as we now know, that was one expensive transaction.

A key characteristic that separates humans from the other animals identified in Genesis is ego. And while ego can be a beneficial motivator in selling professionally, in order to do that successfully, we must do something that’s in direct conflict with our ego — we have to let someone else talk more than us.

So, when you’re on a sales call – face-to-face with a prospect – what do you do? Do you unload the dump truck of stuff about products, pricing, etc. that your company installed in your head? If that’s your answer, your professional selling career is doomed. [Continue Reading]

Two Grueling Competitions: The Tour de France And The Tour de Main Street

July 19, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

As the sun rises on the first day of July, one of the most amazing athletic competitions in the world is set to begin. Since 1903, the Tour de France has been the pinnacle of professional bicycle races, and arguably the most grueling of all sporting competitions.

Contested over 23 days, this race has 21 stages, each averaging more than 100 miles. That’s right. Only two rest days. These superathletes from all over the world navigate diverse road conditions, rain, wind, heat, and legendary mountain ranges – five total, including no less than the Alps and Pyrenees – that God surely created for us to ski down, not pedal up.

As the sun rises on the marketplace, millions of small business owners are set to mount one of the most grueling competitions in the business world – merely by opening up. Against all odds, they start, run, and grow their operations in rude conditions few Corporate America CEOs ever face. But unlike the Tour de France, the Tour de Main Street lasts 365 days, not 23. And sometimes, no rest days.

Combining admiration for both of these types of superhumans, we can identify four common elements required to compete successfully in both tours. [Continue Reading]

In The Age Of The Customer, Relevance Trumps Competitiveness

July 14, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

For 10,000 years, customers refined their search for products and services down to a couple of semi-finalist sellers based almost entirely on the classic competitive value proposition: price, product, availability, service, etc. I’ve termed this period the Age of the Seller.

That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it?

The new prime differentiator today is no longer the competitive model, but rather a customer’s appraisal of how relevant a seller is to them, often before they even know if a seller is competitive. So, does this mean that sellers no longer have to be competitive?

Not at all – no one will pay you more for less. But consider three new marketplace truths: [Continue Reading]