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Other Added - In Small Business, It's Not Easy Being Green
Sorry about my otaku with this issue (otaku = more than a hobby, a little less than an obsession).Many of you may know me, since I run Imediafax, the Internet to Media Fax Service. I send out over a million news releases a year for people via fax and email. You probably think that I’ve got news releases failing on me day in and day out.Actually, I don’t. The news releases I write and send out for people do quite well. My clients are quite happy with me because they are successful with their outreach efforts.It’s the draft news releases that people send to me that are my problem.Fixing the problems I see in the news releases people send me takes forever. It is also very painful.I’ve seen a lot of news release failure over the years, and I now know what the key problems look like and how to fix them.
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to
It’s understandable if your PR fizzles when it’s limited to simple tactics like news releases, broadcast plugs, press events and brochures. But then starts to sizzle when you do something meaningful about the behaviors of those important audiences that MOST affect the business, non-profit, government agency or association unit you manage.It especially sizzles when your public relations creates the kind of external stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives. Then continues as you follow through by persuading those key outside folks to your way of thinking by helping move them to take actions that allow your department, group, division or subsidiary to succeed.A fact of PR life is this: when you need to move a message from here to there, communications t
In 1981, only 25 years ago, the Personal Computer was introduced by IBM with a modest flourish. It was received with a thunderous “ho-hum" by the corporate world.
It was inconceivable that these cute but puny little machines would ever replace those behemoth main frames with their huge computing capacity and endless banks of modular, external memory units that promised almost unlimited power.
What the hell can you do with a “toy" machine like the PC?
Enter Bill Gates and company. In the movie, “The Pirates of Silicone Valley" it is alleged that Mr. Gates conned Xerox out of the now famous operating system called Windows. Then, purportedly, he conned IBM into a $5-a-machine license to use the O.S. The IBM guy thought he had struck a deal because, “…the real money is in the hardware." Yuk, yuk. (It was not the first time that IBM didn’t see the market for the forest (or the chips). Their Mr. Watson had predicted some years earlier, when IBM was basically a typewriter company, that the entire worldwide market for computers was six).
Another difficulty held back the PC – they required extraordinary training to use them. Some of us are old enough to remember those first PC’s required program language commands, stuff like /goto/Line 343 or /P-C3 (print three copies), to make them work.
Mr. Gates changed all that with Icons and multi-tasking, thereby making the PC easily useable by the common office worker. Then large company managers realized they could obtain a degree of freedom from their monolithic and powerful Information Services Departments by using PC’s for their more mundane tasks. When the systems also became easy to learn, Microsoft was well positioned to capitalize on the frenzy for the machines. Later the Internet revolution simply made the PC explosion inevitable and an order of magnitude greater.
The point here is not about the back room antics and intrigues of Silicone Valley. The point is, interesting history aside, Microsoft made the PC better. So much so that it spawned a giant industry and a bevy of very rich executives.
It is an axiom in business that, if you want success, make or do something better or different.
This axiom holds every bit as much for small businesses as it does for the giants. The “me-too" companies will fall by the wayside constantly. If being better or different means reinventing yourself periodically, then do it! The alternative is to perish as a thriving business.
We need to think like Kermit the frog: Being green isn’t easy but it does make us stand out!
YOU'RE NOT BEING GREEN IF...
- You think your quality is better (even if it is). Sorry to say, but quality does not qualify as being green. It may differentiate a product but it rarely differentiates a business. Customers expect the best quality available. If the supposed quality difference is accompanied by higher costs, it is not a quality difference but, more likely, a feature difference.
- Creative, even unique advertising by itself is not being green. It may bring attention to your offering better than the next guy out there, but it is only a communication tool and can only project underlying company strengths, not create them in the long run.
- Concentration on price, more specifically undercutting price, is a lousy discriminator and definitely is not being green. The low ball price leader in any market is the first to go. Pricing is not a long term marketing strategy, it is a short term tactic. Your competitor can slash prices just as quickly as you can, particularly if they happen to be a huge, low-cost manufacturer.
- Having the broadest product line or services mix is not being green. Trying to be everything to everybody is one of the surest ways to financial insecurity in business whether or not you are small or a giant. The trick is to determine the essence of your strengths and focus on them, tailoring the product line or services offered to those strengths. Marginal products and services get promoted from marginal to extinct. Dump them. (For a lesson on product line rationalization and killing sacred cows, read up on Jack Welsh’s book: “Jack")
YOU ARE BEING GREEN IF...
- You’re the first with the best. The first to offer new products or old products with new (valuable) features will get you a reputation as a leader and differentiate you from the competition. Striving to bring the best and the newest to your customers will pay off handsomely in the long run.
- Tying up a feature or benefit with a copyright or patent has always been a good way of being green. Alternatively, keeping un-patentable but unique features secret as long as possible can have the same effect. The politically correct term for this is "know-how".
- Changing or tweaking how you deliver your products or services can produce a difference that results in a jump on the competition and potential increase in market share. Look how fast other soft drink companies had to react and find a competitive 12-pack case when Coke shifted to the new oblong container. It slips right into the fridge and stacks well on the supermarket shelf, it should have been out 20 years ago. What a great idea! I wonder if it got them any market share?
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to
Cleaning companies basically fall into three categories. Large national or multinational companies; small to medium sized companies who operate within well defined regions; and small cleaning companies operating within one single town and often run by husband and wife teams. The very large companies employ many hundreds if not thousands of staff. The SME’s may employ around 10 – 60 people and the very small ones are often reluctant to get involved with employing people at all and if they do their number can be counted on one hand. The majority of the employees regardless of the size of the company are of foreign origin with English being a second language, and generally will be on low pay.Regardless of the size it is incumbent on all of the above to exercise a duty of care on all people that they employ. This duty of care means i
Mr. Gates changed all that with Icons and multi-tasking, thereby making the PC easily useable by the common office worker. Then large company managers realized they could obtain a degree of freedom from their monolithic and powerful Information Services Departments by using PC’s for their more mundane tasks. When the systems also became easy to learn, Microsoft was well positioned to capitalize on the frenzy for the machines. Later the Internet revolution simply made the PC explosion inevitable and an order of magnitude greater.
The point here is not about the back room antics and intrigues of Silicone Valley. The point is, interesting history aside, Microsoft made the PC better. So much so that it spawned a giant industry and a bevy of very rich executives.
It is an axiom in business that, if you want success, make or do something better or different.
This axiom holds every bit as much for small businesses as it does for the giants. The “me-too" companies will fall by the wayside constantly. If being better or different means reinventing yourself periodically, then do it! The alternative is to perish as a thriving business.
We need to think like Kermit the frog: Being green isn’t easy but it does make us stand out!
YOU'RE NOT BEING GREEN IF...
- You think your quality is better (even if it is). Sorry to say, but quality does not qualify as being green. It may differentiate a product but it rarely differentiates a business. Customers expect the best quality available. If the supposed quality difference is accompanied by higher costs, it is not a quality difference but, more likely, a feature difference.
- Creative, even unique advertising by itself is not being green. It may bring attention to your offering better than the next guy out there, but it is only a communication tool and can only project underlying company strengths, not create them in the long run.
- Concentration on price, more specifically undercutting price, is a lousy discriminator and definitely is not being green. The low ball price leader in any market is the first to go. Pricing is not a long term marketing strategy, it is a short term tactic. Your competitor can slash prices just as quickly as you can, particularly if they happen to be a huge, low-cost manufacturer.
- Having the broadest product line or services mix is not being green. Trying to be everything to everybody is one of the surest ways to financial insecurity in business whether or not you are small or a giant. The trick is to determine the essence of your strengths and focus on them, tailoring the product line or services offered to those strengths. Marginal products and services get promoted from marginal to extinct. Dump them. (For a lesson on product line rationalization and killing sacred cows, read up on Jack Welsh’s book: “Jack")
YOU ARE BEING GREEN IF...
- You’re the first with the best. The first to offer new products or old products with new (valuable) features will get you a reputation as a leader and differentiate you from the competition. Striving to bring the best and the newest to your customers will pay off handsomely in the long run.
- Tying up a feature or benefit with a copyright or patent has always been a good way of being green. Alternatively, keeping un-patentable but unique features secret as long as possible can have the same effect. The politically correct term for this is "know-how".
- Changing or tweaking how you deliver your products or services can produce a difference that results in a jump on the competition and potential increase in market share. Look how fast other soft drink companies had to react and find a competitive 12-pack case when Coke shifted to the new oblong container. It slips right into the fridge and stacks well on the supermarket shelf, it should have been out 20 years ago. What a great idea! I wonder if it got them any market share?
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to
"I was at your site for all of two minutes before I bought one of your manuals. I'm impressed!" I love to get emails like this one sent by Vicki from Tucson, Arizona. Marketing my business would be easy if every client bought my products within two minutes of seeing my marketing materials, or signed up for my coaching services after a few minutes on the phone with me.Do you make most of your sales in 2 to 20 minutes from the time a prospect first reads your marketing copy, visits your web site or calls you?Neither do I. I make approximately 10% of my sales at the time of first contact, but most prospects take weeks, months and, in some cases, years to become clients.As I mentioned in my marketing blog, I track sales on the day I send out my marketing newsletter. Typically, orders for my books begin to come in within
We need to think like Kermit the frog: Being green isn’t easy but it does make us stand out!
YOU'RE NOT BEING GREEN IF...
- You think your quality is better (even if it is). Sorry to say, but quality does not qualify as being green. It may differentiate a product but it rarely differentiates a business. Customers expect the best quality available. If the supposed quality difference is accompanied by higher costs, it is not a quality difference but, more likely, a feature difference.
- Creative, even unique advertising by itself is not being green. It may bring attention to your offering better than the next guy out there, but it is only a communication tool and can only project underlying company strengths, not create them in the long run.
- Concentration on price, more specifically undercutting price, is a lousy discriminator and definitely is not being green. The low ball price leader in any market is the first to go. Pricing is not a long term marketing strategy, it is a short term tactic. Your competitor can slash prices just as quickly as you can, particularly if they happen to be a huge, low-cost manufacturer.
- Having the broadest product line or services mix is not being green. Trying to be everything to everybody is one of the surest ways to financial insecurity in business whether or not you are small or a giant. The trick is to determine the essence of your strengths and focus on them, tailoring the product line or services offered to those strengths. Marginal products and services get promoted from marginal to extinct. Dump them. (For a lesson on product line rationalization and killing sacred cows, read up on Jack Welsh’s book: “Jack")
YOU ARE BEING GREEN IF...
- You’re the first with the best. The first to offer new products or old products with new (valuable) features will get you a reputation as a leader and differentiate you from the competition. Striving to bring the best and the newest to your customers will pay off handsomely in the long run.
- Tying up a feature or benefit with a copyright or patent has always been a good way of being green. Alternatively, keeping un-patentable but unique features secret as long as possible can have the same effect. The politically correct term for this is "know-how".
- Changing or tweaking how you deliver your products or services can produce a difference that results in a jump on the competition and potential increase in market share. Look how fast other soft drink companies had to react and find a competitive 12-pack case when Coke shifted to the new oblong container. It slips right into the fridge and stacks well on the supermarket shelf, it should have been out 20 years ago. What a great idea! I wonder if it got them any market share?
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to
“Great is the man that complicate the simple, but greater is the man that simplifies the complicated. That’s why the foundation of an atom bomb is only “E=MC2” - WindyGIn any business, you would find this universal cost. It's a cost even the big conglomerate cannot escape from. This cost is known as plainly as time. For any business to be profitable, the management of this cost is critical. Time is an “unlimited” resource that businesses have the privilege of “buying”, if it can afford its price.When time is paid for, businesses have to keenly manage it with a mindset that it is priceless. Probably worth more than a thousand million times the price it is bought for. That is if you really need to tag it with a price. Simply by leveraging with strategic management and executing common sense decisions (most of the time they a
- Having the broadest product line or services mix is not being green. Trying to be everything to everybody is one of the surest ways to financial insecurity in business whether or not you are small or a giant. The trick is to determine the essence of your strengths and focus on them, tailoring the product line or services offered to those strengths. Marginal products and services get promoted from marginal to extinct. Dump them. (For a lesson on product line rationalization and killing sacred cows, read up on Jack Welsh’s book: “Jack")
YOU ARE BEING GREEN IF...
- You’re the first with the best. The first to offer new products or old products with new (valuable) features will get you a reputation as a leader and differentiate you from the competition. Striving to bring the best and the newest to your customers will pay off handsomely in the long run.
- Tying up a feature or benefit with a copyright or patent has always been a good way of being green. Alternatively, keeping un-patentable but unique features secret as long as possible can have the same effect. The politically correct term for this is "know-how".
- Changing or tweaking how you deliver your products or services can produce a difference that results in a jump on the competition and potential increase in market share. Look how fast other soft drink companies had to react and find a competitive 12-pack case when Coke shifted to the new oblong container. It slips right into the fridge and stacks well on the supermarket shelf, it should have been out 20 years ago. What a great idea! I wonder if it got them any market share?
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to
Experts have become omnipresent. They're everywhere: on your favorite television show, on drive time radio programming, on blogs and internet discussion forums, between the pages of nationally popular magazines and your local newspaper. You can't throw a dart, it seems, without having it hit an Expert on the way to the dartboard. Why is this happening? What has motivated all of these people -- financial planners and attorneys, floral designers and wedding planners, massage therapists and ear, nose and throat specialists -- to take on the Expert mantle? One reason: Being the Expert is one of the most efficient, effective ways to ensure your professional and financial success. This trend is consumer driven. According to Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, consumers increasing
- Creating a product or service that addresses a specific market niche is another way of being green. A car repair shop that specializes in foreign cars or just Hondas, a cleaning service for yachts, and Honey Baked Hams are examples. Specialization breeds expertise, better market share control and better margins for value given.
- Be really green, give the best total service in your industry. Don’t just re-label lousy customer service and call it “customer care", yet have the same bureaucratic procedures for customers to navigate and telephone decision trees to climb. Look at your entire process of customer contact from initial solicitation to correcting a problem after the sale. Streamline it, make it as simple and easy to use as possible. “Easy to order, no hassles" is still a good business philosophy especially in today’s excessive information, poor communication world.
COMMIT TO BEING GREEN
The essence of the capitalist spirit is the desire to continually strive to make things better and different; not being satisfied with the way things are. It is a corollary and an irony that in doing so we often improve our business performance, stability and financial security at the same time.
We must never, never stop asking the question: “How can I make my product or service better or different?"
Like Kermit the frog, it’s not easy being green, but it is worthwhile and sometimes crucial to success.
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