success

Feed Your Spirit And Starve Your Alligators

June 29, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

Small business owners know all about that metaphorical business reptile – the ubiquitous alligator. They slither in from everywhere, continuously chomping holes in your business, tearing apart projects, taking a bite out of performance, and eating away at momentum.

We know three things about these caustic crocodilians: 1) every small business has them; 2) they don’t go away on their own; 3) besides the operational intrusion, they take an emotional toll. And as good as we may get at minimizing the business damage alligators can cause, we’re too often not as good at dealing with that emotional thing.

As the CEO of your business, if your enterprise is to survive, let alone flourish, you have to deal with each alligator that pops up. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, your business’s sustainability and organizational effectiveness depend on the ability to keep your head when all around, hungry alligators are trying to take it off.

To keep your head and at least stay even with the alligators you must do three things. [Continue Reading]

Networking For Referrals: It Makes Business Easier And Life Simpler

April 20, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

The act and practice of networking – for business or any other endeavor – is one of the great intangibles in life. Networking can help you get into a college, a new job, a business prospect – you get the picture. But none of this happens until you actually meet people.

In the marketplace, the business reason for networking is to get referrals. Ivan Misner is the Founder of Business Network International (BNI), the world’s guru of networking, and the author of a wheelbarrow-full of books on the subject. He thinks people who don’t get enough referrals just don’t know how to ask for them. I agree. Ivan has an excellent suggestion to help with this, and it revolves around the person called the “center-of-influence,” or COI for short. The COI is the connection between you and the person you want/need to meet, and whom you likely met while networking.

Ivan says, “Don’t make your COI do all your work for you. Help them out by asking this question, ‘Who do you know who…?’ and then finish the sentence with a description that fits what you need: your business, industry, product, service, etc.” Here’s an example: John, let me ask you a question, who do you know who buys advertising? …truck tires? …owns apartments?

Here’s a concept I call, “Blasingame’s Entrée Spectrum.”[Continue Reading]

The CEO Question: Where Is My Company Going?

March 30, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

In a column a few weeks ago, I pointed out that every business, including small ones, has assignments that can only be performed by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). In that article, I covered two of those Big Jobs:

1. CEO strategic responsibilities are not optional.

2. Small business CEOs have to periodically transport themselves from the operating trenches to a 30,000-foot strategic orbit.

There is the third Big Job that’s the sole domain of the CEO, and it’s what we’re going to cover now.

3. The CEO’s three Big Pictures: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going?

The last part of this Big Job, “Where are we going,” becomes easier if you focus on what I call the 21st-century Big Four Factors: Bricks, Clicks, People, and Capital. Take a look at these handy parameters and let them help you focus better on this CEO Big Job.

BRICKS

Location and space are considered for a span of years: one, three, five, twenty, etc. What will your operation need to look like in five years? How long will your current location serve you? Will the physical space align with your strategy? What infrastructure and equipment will you need in one year, or five? Your future square footage requirements per dollar of revenue will likely be different in the next five years than in the past five.

CLICKS

This is both internal and external technology. Internal is hardware, software, networking, and connectivity required to both buy and sell efficiently and productively. External is the technology you ask customers to use in order to do business with you. This timeline is shorter than BRICKS; usually months or a year or two. Be prepared for this Factor to increasingly occupy more of your time every year.

PEOPLE

The line between consideration for PEOPLE and CLICKS is becoming increasingly blurred, especially regarding technology acquisition to mitigate the lack of available qualified employees. What will the company need humans to do in one, three, or five years? How many people and what kind of talent will you need? What kind of technology and training will team members need to meet those requirements? How will technology adoption impact the organization chart? Which jobs require employees, and which could be filled by an outsourcing contract?

The second part of PEOPLE is customers. What will your customer profile look like in one, three, or five years? What will be their expectations? What do you have to do to meet those expectations with relevance, not just competitiveness?

CAPITAL

How will you fund the future? What financial management systems and standards will you need? What combination of retained earnings, debt, and investment will produce a successful capitalization strategy? What do you need to know about new funding sources?

Only someone filling the role of CEO can ask and find answers to these strategic questions. Who’s asking these questions in your business?

Write this on a rock … If the buck for your business stops on your desk, you’re the CEO. Do the job.

Your American Dream Could Have Been Started By Someone Else

March 17, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

The American Dream has many components, but to me, the big three are liberty, business ownership, and home ownership. The order is intentional.

Liberty is prime because it makes the other two possible. Freedom is from God, but liberty is a contract we give to each other.
Business ownership in America has produced more self-determination than any other force in history, including from all of the associated jobs.
Homeownership is available to all Americans who’ve claimed one of those jobs.

As much as the latter two are part of our liberty, business ownership is the most challenging. Blasingame’s 1st Law of Small Business states: “It’s easy to start a small business, but it’s not easy to operate and grow one.”

That paradox manifests in full measure when the entrepreneurial sap starts rising in the bark of a prospective business owner who decides to start from scratch. It’s a natural process to envision your new business and then set about creating it out of whole cloth. But that natural urge must be tempered with this rude truth: Someone else has probably already created something that looks a whole lot like what you’re thinking about creating. Consider these points before you become a startup. [Continue Reading]

Bring Your Customer’s Customer Into Focus

March 10, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.

In photographic terms, the range of focus front to back is called depth of field. The best way to expand depth of field so more of the subjects in the photo are in focus is to add light. Light contributes to depth of field.

If you were given a photo of people who were the most critical to your success, you’d easily recognize your customers in the foreground in perfect focus. But as you look deeper into the photo you’d notice the images behind that first row increasingly drop out of focus with each receding row. The reason is that for most of the history of the marketplace, businesses have gotten away with having a very narrow customer depth of field.

When the coin of the realm was to be competitive, that meant you spent all your time thinking about how to serve the person in the foreground, the first row of your business world: your customers. But as I’ve revealed in the past, being competitive has been trumped by being relevant. And in The Age of the Customer, perhaps the most important component of being relevant to business customers is helping them serve the most important person in their photo: [Continue Reading]

It’s Possible To Succeed Yourself Out Of Business

March 2, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This is another offering in my ongoing series on understanding the fundamentals of business as we become better business managers. Remember, fundamentals are like natural laws: they don’t change; they’re the same for everyone, and you can’t succeed without understanding and respecting them. The fundamentals today are all about funding growth.

Consider the following scenario that plays out on Main Street every day:

“Finally, my business is growing,” a small business owner confides to his friend, “but why is it creating so much negative cash?” And then, with that deer-in-the-headlights look, he completes his report, “I thought by now, with increased sales, cash would be the least of my worries. I used to be afraid I couldn’t grow my business; now I’m worried it will collapse from growth.”

This entrepreneur’s lament is one of the great ironies of the marketplace: a small business in danger of failure succeeding itself right out of business.

Beware Blasingame’s 2nd Law of Small Business: It’s redundant to say, “undercapitalized small business.” This maxim is especially true for fast-growing companies because revenue growth depletes cash in two dramatic but predictable ways. [Continue Reading]