The Power of Incrementalism

If you ever tried to tackle a really big job? One of those jobs where the goal looks overwhelming like losing 100 pounds or writing a Book? How about making 1000 cold calls! Surely that would be a great goal to set. There is a big secret to getting these kinds of things done, and with low anxiety.

You have to do it a piece-at-a-time over time. You need to agree in advance how long you will take, and how much you will do each day, week, or month. When I write a book, I estimate the number of pages, lets say 250. I can write 2 pages an hour, so that is 125 hours. I can set aside an hour a day Monday-Thursday and two hours on Saturday. So I have 6 hours per week. So, 22 weeks to write the first draft. It is no longer an elephant in my plate. Just today's quarter pounder.

Want to make a 1000 cold calls. Do it in 250 days (50 weeks X 5 days) at 4 calls per day. Couldn't possibly take more than 1 hour per day to make those 4 calls. If anyone reading this has the slightest doubt that your business would increase substantially as a result of making 1000 cold calls next year, please leave your comments.

Sales success
Small Business
Management
Personal Motivation

"Running A 21st Century Small Business" Gets 1st Review

I may not post every review, but hopefully you'll indulge my posting those as nice as this in the Houston Chronical.

I don't know if this review caused it, but the book moved from #160,000 best selling to 5,600th best on Amazon. If you and all your friends go buy one, maybe we could get into the 100's!

Do You Make Decisions Based on the Fear-Greed Curve?

I can’t take credit for the following concept, and I can’t quite remember who said it previously. However, it makes such sense, and is far more understandable to the average person than supply-demand. The world economy is driven by the fear-greed curve.

Gasoline Prices got you down. Want someone or something to blame. It is so easy to blame big, nasty corporations who want to rip of consumers, neighbors across the continent or around the world who are driving gas guzzlers, or the Bush administration for not taking some action (the action would depend on your political point of view.)

However, I propose that the real culprit is the natural way of mankind. We are driven by many things, but two of the most powerful are fear and greed. The major energy corporations are afraid to invest in new equipment, exploration, etc., because they are afraid the price will come back down to $12 a barrel. (Remember the last energy price bust and what it did to Texas banking?) However, as the price stays high, some of the competitors in the energy biz (be it companies or countries) get greedy, and try to increase markehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gift share by lowering their price. Others then become fearful that they will lose market share or end up with mountains of inventory, so they lower their price also.

As the price goes up, the greed factor also plays in. Some companies or countries artificially raise the price to see what the market will bear, and are all too willing to take advantage of shortages, real or imagined. This only works for a while, because at some point, somebody is going to start adding capacity to maximize profit (greed.)

You act the same way on a smaller scale in your business and personal life. Think about it. Our company's products are primarily made from plastic. The plastics we purchase are based on natural gas. The cost of natural gas spiked in the fall as did our costs. Now the price of natural gas has plummeted by 30%, but our costs have gone down by less than 5%. The major plastics producers have not yet been hit by the fear part of the curve.

In the meantime, I am trying to figure out how to price my product. Catalogs in the advertising specialty industry usually get mailed before the first of each year. But I have not even printed mine as of Feb. 25. I fear raising my prices and losing market share. I also fear losing margin. But if my costs were to drop 30% would I lower my selling prices? Would my competitors?

Energy Pricing Boondoggle

Speaking of energy prices, I buy LDPE by the carload. The underlying raw material is natural gas. Our pricing almost doubled last year, and is only creeping down a bit at this point. There are many components to this whole mess, but among them:

Actual Supply and Demand
Perceived Supply and Demand
Fear by major purchasers creating hoarding
Greed by major suppliers creating false shortages
Unrest drives up futures markets
And my own personal touch - I think the major countries who supply energy are creating the crisis of the week to keep prices high. One week its Russia, then Venezuela, then the middle east, then Africa. I even suspect there are phone calls: "Your turn."

No, I'm not a wacko conspiracy theorist, but check out the news over the last two years. With the exception of Katrina, the rest of the spike in pricing can be attributed to the "news" of the week spooking futures.

Top 10 Business Oppty's of 2005

Best Business Opportunities for 2005

The Business Coaching Craze

The World of Business Brokers

Garage Organizer's The Last Frontier

Smart Clothing

Medical Transcription Services A Doctor's Best Friend

Trash Removal One Man's Treasure

Anti-Aging Spas Are Forever Young

The Student Boom Helps College Admissions Consulting

Translation Services More Than English

Everything's Poker

For details on any of these, go here

Business
Small Business
Opportunity
Entrepreneur
Business Start up

Rule 10 from Sam Walton - Not necessarily in this Order

This would be closer to the top in my list.

Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

Business
Small Business
Building a Niche in business
Sam Walton business ideas

Control Costs and Expenses - Rule 9

Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer — we've ranked No. 1 in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

Comment: If your costs of materials is 3% less than your competition, you can sell 3% lower, make 3% more at the same sell, or put 3% more into advertising. WalMart did all of these things at one time or another.

Business
Small Business
Accounting
Profits and Losses
Business success

Sam Walton - Rule 8 - Do Even More than 101%

Rule 8: Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: "Satisfaction Guaranteed." They're still up there, and they have made all the difference.

Comment: This story is told over and over by all effective leaders. If your customer expects the phones to be answered by a human voice, give them a human voice and one that can actually handle their needs. We have a policy that all customers and vendors have full and unfettered access to our top administrators.

Customer Service
Small Business
Business success
Marketing

Listen - God Gave You Two Ears and Only One Mouth -

Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines — the ones who actually talk to the customer — are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.

Business
Small Business
Business Strategies
Marketing
Management
Employees
Customer Service
Human Resources