Posted by Keith Lowe in Business Owner on November 22nd, 2009
“Successful entrepreneurs are those who have a passion for their business and the money to survive their mistakes. I’ve occasionally seen success happen without sufficient funding, but I’ve never once seen it happen without passion.” – Roy H. Williams, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads
When I first read this I thought “Right on Roy! Passion, yeah baby!”
But you know, it isn’t enough. The successful businesses I’ve started were the ones that I not only had a passion for, but fit my personality.
I used to believe that the business didn’t matter to me. I felt I would be happy running any business because it was the process I loved; making things work, the down and dirty details. I suspect I felt that way because I really do enjoy those things. But while you do have to like the business, maybe even love it, it has to “be you” – it has to fit your personality.
You may be a restaurateur, a baker, a consultant, or a writer. Or maybe part of all of them. But I doubt you are really great at more than one of them. You may be smart and hard working, and maybe passionate about all of them but is your personality such that you can successfully build a business out of more than one of them?
Ryan and I started this business at the end of some serious soul searching about what we really wanted to do with the rest of our lives. It became clear to me when I thought about the some recent experiences giving talks to potential small business owners. And talking with them afterward about their ideas and plans and giving them the benefit of my experience.
I’ve found that I love writing this blog. I love sitting across the table from someone and showing them how they can do this and be more effective or that and save some money. I walk out of most of those meetings nearly floating. It is incredible!
I think I feel that way because I’ve found the one thing I’m really good at; better at by far than anything else I do. Because it “fits”. People tell me “yeah, I can see how you’d be good at that.” They never said that about most of the businesses I’ve had in the past.
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Posted by ryan in Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Productivity on November 15th, 2009
A friend of Keith’s is trying to find a job. Keith spent an hour advising him on how to fix his (really poor) resume to get more opportunities. Unfortunately, he declined to do any of it, saying “that’s just basic stuff”.
He’s right that it was mostly “basic stuff”, but he’s still not doing it. It’s “basic stuff” for a reason: while it seems really simple and obvious, he still needs to do it to be successful.
I was reminded of the Biblical story of Naaman the leper. When told what he needed to do to cure his awful disease, at first he refused because it sounded too simple for a great man like himself. (It’s a great story, btw).
Look, success is rarely easy. But sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be by overlooking the “obvious” things. Sometimes we’re trying to install a complicated triangle offense in a pickup basketball game with 2nd-graders. They don’t know how to dribble the ball, much less run the triple post.
You have to start with the basics, and keep working on just those things until you’ve got them down. Then worry about the complicated stuff. Details, details, details.
The great thing is that most people seem to make this same mistake. They try to fly before they can crawl. So if you get the fundamentals down, you’ll easily beat out other people — some of whom may even be more qualified than you — who are running around trying to launch some grand, complicated plan without “wasting time” on that piddly basic stuff. Without a foundation, they have very little chance of succeeding, no matter how talented they are.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t worry about what the other guy claims he’s going to do. Don’t worry about how good the competition could be if they just did the “basic stuff”.
You just make sure you’re doing all the basics right, and worry about the rest when there are no more “basic” things to master.
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Marketing and Selling on November 7th, 2009
When you created your last ad, did you have a specific plan? Or did you just get on camera and yell “I’M CRAZY! I’VE GOT CRAZY PRICES! SO COME ON DOWN!”?
It’s so easy to create the same old ad that says “sigh, we’re here, yawn, snore.”
Have a purpose
And sometimes, maybe that’s just what you need. But not usually. Whether you are doing a TV ad, something for a magazine, a direct mail piece, whatever – have a purpose.
This is something I just hadn’t thought much about until Laura showed me an ad map. All you have to do is ask yourself 4 simple questions:
- What are my prospects currently doing?
- What do I want them to do?
- What do my prospects currently believe?
- What do I want them to believe?
Try this yourself
This is one of the easier things you can do to improve your advertising, so why wait? Dive in right now!
- Create this simple box in a document or spreadsheet (OK, here, we’ve done it for you).
- Examine each of your current ads, ask yourself those 4 questions, and fill in the boxes. Then fix them!
- Whenever you are creating new ads, always use this first. If you outsource your ad creation, make sure your people have one of these and are clear what the ad is supposed to do.
Not just ads
Think about this for everything your customer sees. Are you asking those questions for how you answer the phone, your logo, letterhead, marketing materials, vehicles, business cards? Each of those should have been created while asking questions 1 & 3 and should be designed to reinforce your desired answers to questions 2 & 4.
We’d love to see some of yours! Please post a comment and tell us how it went (or even post your answers if you feel like sharing).
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If this article was helpful to you, please forward it to a friend! And don’t forget to subscribe to receive future posts via email or RSS.
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Employees on October 17th, 2009
As a business owner/leader you should always look for ways to positively reinforce your culture.
I ran across a recent issue of Business Week which noted a study by the Nottingham School of Economics on apologies versus cash incentives. In the study, researchers contacted customers who’d filed online complaints about a German wholesaler. They offered a cash incentive to half the unhappy customers if they would remove their complaint. To the other half, they offered a short apology and requested they remove their complaints. Amazingly, 45% of the customers receiving an apology removed their complaints, compared to only 21% of the customers offered cash.
I thought this was a great point and took a minute to comment on it for our staff at Conditioned Air Solutions, partly because it reinforced our philosophy on saying we’re sorry when we mess up.
Do I think we have a problem with regard to this? No, I really don’t. Do I think if I don’t reinforce the critical parts of our culture whenever I see an opportunity, we’ll eventually lose track of why things like this are important, and won’t naturally handle each situation the right way? You bet I do.
I attached a scan of the article to the email to our staff and pointed out how true I thought it was and included a couple of examples of experiences I’d recently had personally.
This example was about how we have to make a judgment call on how to handle each of our mistakes. Unless you run a fairly small company, you can’t make each decision for each customer interaction. But as the founder or owner, you want those decisions to be in line with your intentions. The way to make that happen is to train your people in the way you want it done and then look for opportunities to reinforce that training.
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Marketing and Selling on October 9th, 2009
You can give your customers that little extra personal touch with note cards. Little things like this have surprising power to help you stand out from your competition.
Handwritten notes are uncommon these days, so people notice and remember it favorably when you send one. This is particularly true if you are in sales, consulting, or any personal service business. But really, almost any business is ultimately a “personal service business”, so pay attention!
You should already have a set of postcards for mailing personal notes to customers and friends. Treat note cards as another weapon in your personal touch arsenal. Here’s one of mine:
Attach a note to a something you want to send to a client or colleague:
If I find a local newspaper article on one of my customers, I’ll cut it out, scribble a quick note of congratulations on my note card, and drop it in the mail to them.
It’s more “efficient” to scan and email it, but it’s not nearly as personal. Used judiciously, it’s different enough to get noticed. It says, “I took the time to send this to you,” much more effectively than anything that arrives on your computer (though scanning and emailing may actually take you longer).
Lisa, our bookkeeper at Conditioned Air Solutions, often adds note cards to account statements and overdue invoices during her regular collections process. It adds a personal touch and often gets some attention when other things are tossed.
We also have some blank cards (similar to mine but with no name or email address) that we use around the office for people who need one occasionally, but not often enough to justify printing personalized ones. It’s much better to write on a blank one than have to take someone else’s and scribble out their name and put your own. Note cards are cheap, though, so if you think this is worthwhile, don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Make sure anyone who could profitably use them has some available.
If you want some of your own, any printer to whom you show this article should be able to make yours easily. You can also go to any of a gazillion web sites such as 123PRINT. You have my permission to use mine as a template.
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Marketing and Selling on September 30th, 2009
Comanche Marketing has a terrific series of articles on boosting your average sale (#2 of The Three Ways). One that caught my eye was to use your fax cover page as a marketing tool. Wow, what a great idea!
So I decided to do that. That was the easy part. But how would I start? Right about there is where I usually grind to a halt. Maybe you have this problem, too: we have a great idea, but no clue where to start, so we just sigh and move on.
You know the phrase “the best is the enemy of the good”? In this context, it means if I don’t see how to do the best possible fax cover sheet ad, I won’t do it at all. Ryan and I have been masters at this excuse.
But let’s face it: it’s pretty hard to mess up a fax cover sheet. Just try something. As long as you don’t do something offensive (use a little judgment, right?), you’ll be OK. If you use coupons, slap one on there. If your customers need to come see you, post your hours. If you are a restaurant, post a description of your best dish. If you are anyone, just post a bunch of customer testimonials (you do have some, right?).
So how did I do it? Well, I was fast out of the gate, and my graphic designer gave me exactly what I asked for:
While it was exactly what I asked, it had looked better in my head than it did on the screen. So far, no big deal.
But then I made the Big Mistake: since I didn’t know what to do next, I did nothing. What I should have done was start using this right away and move on to something else. It was far better marketing than the standard cover sheet we had always used. But I didn’t. I failed to remember that this is only a fax cover sheet – I can change it next week and every week forever if I want. I’m not paying for a huge stack of brochures that have to be as good as possible the first time. It isn’t an earth-shattering deal that will make or break my company. It’s simply another little thing I can do to push us ahead.
Even though I knew better, I let the best be the enemy of the good. After spending far too much time on it, I wound up with testimonials:
Is this perfect? Not by a long shot. Is it good enough? Probably. Is it better than a vanilla cover sheet? Definitely.
So here’s what I’m doing: I’m declaring this done and asking the office staff to use it. If they need more space to write, we’ll fix it. We’ll tweak it as we need to, and if one day someone has a brainstorm about something better to put on here, we’ll change it.
You can do this easily. Don’t take weeks on yours like I did on mine. If you want to promote your company in this way, pick something and do it! Understand the risk of it not being perfect (very low) and adjust your time/money/energy investment accordingly.
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Cost Savings, Productivity on September 24th, 2009
I recently asked several contractors I use for research and writing projects to send me future deliveries in Open Office’s OpenDocument format. Open Office is completely free and in my experience has 90%+ of the functionality of Microsoft Office for 0% of the price. See here for a quick overview of why you should use it.
We’ve used it at Conditioned Air since we’ve been in business (March 2004) and have had very few interoperability problems with Microsoft Office. It is an amazing tool set that looks and works as well on the Mac (among other platforms) as it does on the PC. Few of our current customers or vendors use it but (and this is a big part of my point here) that’s not been a problem for us – Open Office easily reads and writes Microsoft’s .doc/.xls/.docx/.xlsx files.
So why do I care what my vendors use? Three reasons:
- I hate to see people spend money they don’t have to. Conditioned Air has proven, with 5.5 years of real world use on thousands of documents and spreadsheets (and much interaction with our Word/Excel using customers), that most people simply don’t need Microsoft Office. Why spend the money, worry about licensing issues, and just deal with the hassle if you don’t need to? Maybe this strategy isn’t for everyone, but for many small businesses it is just the thing!
- As Ryan and I do more writing (such as our upcoming ebook on how to do collections in a small business) and sometimes have contractors help us, we find that we want to keep larger projects in one format instead of translating back and forth (in this case, from .docx to .odt and vice versa).
- When I hire a contractor, the purpose is to make my life easier. I’m paying them to do something that I either can’t do, can’t do well enough, or simply don’t want to do. Receiving projects in OpenDocument format is just one more little thing that helps me.
So why not download it and try it out? It isn’t a free trial or anything like that – it is FREE, period. You have nothing to lose and $ to gain!
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling on September 5th, 2009
New companies that want to succeed based on really great service have always started at a disadvantage.
The disadvantage is you can’t really advertise that. You can claim to offer great service in your ads, but since everyone else says it, too, nobody has reason to believe you.
You see, you have to prove you provide great service before people will be willing to choose you on that basis. Proving how good your service really is to a customer only takes one opportunity. But proving it to your whole marketplace takes a long, long time.
Conditioned Air has been in business for 5 1/2 years, and focused on superior customer service the whole time. That’s been great for our customers (our customer turnover rate is very low for our industry). Yet after all that time, not nearly enough people know about us. We add new customers daily, but the vast majority of people in our market still haven’t had a chance to try us out.
Many service businesses focus on bringing in as many new customers as possible, as fast as possible. They have to constantly rush new customers in the front door by hook or crook, since their current customers are escaping out the back door the first chance they get because the service is bad.
If you really do offer great service, you don’t lose as many customers, and don’t have to spend as much money acquiring new customers to replace the ones fleeing. In the long run, it’s a great strategy to build a large and loyal customer base.
But the short- and medium-term problem remains: how is a prospective customer to know how good your service really is until they try you? And if your main competitive advantage is great service, how do you convince them to give you a shot?
How does anyone know who actually delivers and who doesn’t? Personal recommendations are great. But relying on traditional word-of-mouth is tough, because a good reputation spreads slowly and unevenly that way.
Now along comes Angie’s List, what I consider the Amazon book ranking of the service industry. I buy a lot from Amazon – pretty much any time I plan to buy something, I check them first. One big reason is the helpful customer reviews (for an example, see one of my favorite business books). They’ve helped me see through advertising and hype many times.
That’s what Angie’s List does for service companies. What you see there are raw customer opinions about thousands of contractors. Conditioned Air can’t influence the wording, can’t pay to change anything to make us look better. About all any company can do is offer a discount coupon or pay a small amount to be highlighted within their ranking. But if a customer is unhappy with the service they got and gives them a low ranking, it’s there for the world to see. Here is how it looks:
[September 2009 - removed screen shot of Conditioned Air's current rating due to this email from Angie's List Brand Enforcement Coordinator:
Thanks for the write up in your online article and for sharing it with us! I am happy to pass along the online article to our PR department, but I also want to follow up with you in regards to Angie’s List brand guidelines. We appreciate your commitment to excellent customer service and your presence as an advertiser on our list. While we hope that high ratings on Angie’s List are a mark of pride for both business owners and employees, we must still monitor how service providers promote this recognition in order to maintain the value of our brand.
Angie’s List Brand Enforcement primarily follows up with those that have unauthorized references to the Angie’s List trademarked name or logo on their company websites and online listings or advertisements. We understand service providers want to promote their inclusion on Angie’s List, and we do make some allowances to reference Angie’s List on social networking websites such as blogs, Twitter and in this case, an article. In general, Angie’s List name can be referenced in postings, but we do not allow companies to reference ratings because these ratings may be accurate one day, but not the next. Additionally, Angie’s List does not authorize duplication of website content, which is copyrighted.
Angie’s List asks that the screen shot of a ratings page from our private member website is removed from the article. I included a screen shot of the article below for your reference. We ask that this change is made by the end of the next week (Sept. 18), to meet compliance within Angie’s List brand guidelines.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to clarify Angie’s List brand guidelines. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you ever have questions about our guidelines. I would be happy to assist you.]
Does that mean Conditioned Air gets nothing but A ratings? No, any business will eventually have some unhappy customers. But for the real customer service pros, the unhappy few will be drowned out by the many positive reviews. And what you will see is a bunch of unbiased, detailed customer opinions that you can read to decide who to hire.
How cool is that? I love it because it lets us shine through our customer’s words, not our own. It sorts out the pretenders, even the ones spending lavishly on huge Yellow Page and constant media ads. There is no hiding bad service in the Angie’s List world.
As the world gets more and more connected, and information gets more easily accessible by the people who need it, I think we are going to see lots of inefficiencies like this go away. No more having to just try some contractor (or dentist or doctor or car dealer) based on one or two data points (or much worse, their advertising budget). You’ll now be able to instantly see what people just like you have received from whomever you are thinking of using.
I say it’s about time!
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Posted by Keith Lowe in Customer Service on August 31st, 2009
One of Conditioned Air’s customers sent us a nice thank-you letter. A couple of months later I was talking to him, and he mentioned he was a tad disappointed that we hadn’t followed up with him.
In our business we want to look for any reason to “touch” the customer. The more we are in contact with a customer, the more opportunities they have to see what kind of company we are.
So I went to each of our office staff and explained that anytime we have an opportunity to touch a customer, we need to seize it:
- When we get a thank-you letter, our service manager has a great chance to dash off a quick handwritten thank-you card in return.
- When a part we ordered is delayed, we can send email or call to give the customer a quick status update.
- When we make a mistake, we have a major opportunity to apologize and fix it.
- When someone complains about one of our trucks speeding (hey, it occasionally happens), we can turn that into a positive experience by thanking them, explaining how we’ll handle it with the culprit, then giving them a coupon for helping us be a better company.
- When anyone allows us to do a project for them, we want to always thank them with a post card!
Sit down right now and write down five different opportunities you have to “touch” your customers. Then train your staff and follow up to make sure they are taking advantage of every opportunity.
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Posted by ryan in Marketing and Selling on August 22nd, 2009
You want to increase your sales? There are only three ways to do it:
- Sell to more customers
- Sell more to each customer (higher average transaction)
- Sell more often to each customer (higher frequency)
So when you’re trying to figure out how to sell more, focus on these three things. If you can’t see clearly how some new idea will help one (or more) of those three things, toss it. It’s a waste of time.
Let’s look at each in a little more detail:
1. Selling to more customers is all about increasing traffic. Adding new customers is probably the first thing people think of when they put on their ‘marketing’ cap. It’s great to have more customers. But it’s not the only way to increase your sales, and it’s not always the best way.
Crazy? Not really. We talk a lot here about customer service. Paying proper attention to every facet of your interaction with your customers really sets you apart. But the more customers you have to deal with, the harder and more expensive this is to do well.
Acquiring new customers is pretty expensive, too. Estimates range from 2x to 7x the cost for acquiring a new customer versus retaining an old one. Don’t forget your existing customers are a valuable asset to you.
2. Selling more to each customer will allow you to sell more without increasing your customer service load from the higher number of relationships. Your existing customers buy from you because they’ve already decided that they like or trust you, or what you sell. They’ve already chosen you over your competition, so why not take advantage of that and offer them some more things they can buy from you?
Now, a little caution is in order: you have to stay focused on what you do well. Just because someone likes your ladies’ hat store, that doesn’t mean you should also open up an auto parts section inside. But within the “what you do well” arena, is there more you could do without significantly altering your business or your processes? Zappo’s started out selling shoes, then added handbags. Shoes and handbags don’t look much alike, but they share a lot of characteristics important to Zappo’s business: easy to ship, good margins, and huge overlap among the customer bases.
Your job is to think about who already buys from you, find out what they want (which you can do by asking them), and see if you can sell them some of that, too.
3. Selling more often to each customer is about frequency. Even with people that like you and what you do or sell, it’s easy to forget you’re there. One of the most important things you can do to keep a past customer a future customer is to find ways to remind them you’re there (without annoying them).
Lots of retail stores have sales for just this reason. They’re not really eager to get less for what they sell (that sort of violates #2 above), but they’ve learned that people are almost always happy to be contacted about a chance to save some money.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with running sales (there’s a lot that is wrong with how it’s normally done, but that’s another post some day). But you don’t want to sell less in return for more often. What you need to be thinking about is how to bring your customer into your store more often without bribing them to come there.
That’s it: only three things. Find ways to increase each of them without sacrificing either of the others. Increase all three together and Good Things will happen.
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