NOTE: *I believe the title of this article can be attributed to economist Paul Romer.

As the economy liquefies in front of your eyes, it is hard to find anything positive in the gooey mess stuck to your shoes.

Cost structures have changed. Some of your customers simply disappeared overnight. The customers that are left now have new preferences and new needs. Their thin margins make your margins thinner. You are sleeping less and drinking more.

In the movie Airplane, Lloyd Bridges summed up the mood of small business perfectly when he said: “Looks like I picked a bad time to stop sniffing glue.”

We’ve been hit over the head so many different ways about the economy and the new reality that we’re all a little punch drunk. Those that aren’t punch drunk are frozen by fear. There is way too much uncertainty. When people are confused, they do not buy.

But, thankfully, there is good news.  There is nothing like the face through the windshield shock of being buried under a giant pile of crap to get your mind focused on digging yourself out.  To maintain or even grow, it is time to revisit, rethink the and even discard some of the basic assumptions that sustained you during boom times.

So where should you focus your soul searching?

Look at the customers you still have. Even more, look at the customers you still have that are strong enough to survive and worth an extra investment from you.

Don’t over over-intellectualize this. This is a simple task that relies mostly on gut instinct and a little supporting data. Make a list of the customer criteria you find most valuable. This could be the most profitable. Fastest to pay. Easiest to work with.  The ones with the lowest cost. Whatever your criteria, write it down.  You have 20 minutes.

Once you have this list of characteristics, go through your current customers and rank them against the list.  Use numbers, use color codes, use a flinch-test, just rank them.  Who exhibits the best characteristics?  Who sort-of does? And who exhibits almost none of them?

Once you have this ranked list, tune the value you offer (products/services), your value-offering mechanism (marketing), your value-delivery practices (execution), and value-support practices (customer service) to serve the ones that fit.

Work hard to fine tune your value so these customers stay customers forever. Make it brain-dead simple for them to become word-of-mouth referrers of your service to others in their circle.

Next step?   Cut the bad customers (or let them cut themselves)

Thin the herd. Find the ones that raise your costs. These are the ones who use your customer service extensively, who constantly shop your bids, jump on your specials, ignore your follow-on promotions, and in general just raise the costs of doing business.

Fire them or even better, raise your rates. Some will leave but some of the bad customers might become good customers if they pay more.

Listen to your employees!

Don’t know how to increase service to those most desirable customers?  Your front-line salespeople do. 

Your employees are your front line; they make or break your organization. Living in the belly of the beast your employees see what’s going on from the inside out. The employees are really what your customers are buying, they make the products, provide the services and give the insight that your customers pay for.

When money is in short supply everyone needs to step up the game.

In fact, there may be evidence that too much money could be a bad thing (no laughing). A study by Booz Allen Hamilton (website registration required) on the 1,000 publicly held companies with the biggest R&D spend suggests that factors other than money may be the most important drivers of innovation. In fact, the study suggests that innovation may be inversely proportional to the size of the budget.

No money and plenty of time gives your employees a chance to really show off their strengths. What looks better on a resume than saying that you helped a company to overcome an economic downturn and stay the course in rough water? Ask them to step up to the challenge.

Now, find new customers that look like your good customers.

Easier said than done. The main point here is that your sales and marketing must be trimmed intelligently.

Take heed to the famous quote attributed to department store merchant John Wannamaker. Wannamaker said: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Half your marketing budget is probably not working. The tactics that are hard to measure should probably be eliminated.  The simple and easy to quantify tactics with built in measurement that worked when you started the business – the email newsletters, working your referral network, direct mail, PPC, improving your website, paying attention, speaking, getting intimate with your CRM database, measuring sales activity and conducting lots of testing  – all those tactics worked in the past and it may be time to revisit them.

 Finally, be ready to ACT!

So what if the economy is hitting a rough spot? Once you’ve invested more in your customers, cut off the dead limbs, watered the good ones, and given your employees a chance to really shine your company is going to be stronger.

If you have cash, there are great deals to be had, if you have good credit, banks are still lending. Everybody is willing to negotiate.  It is a buyer’s market.

Warren Buffet said “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Right now high quality talent is plentiful, there are many exceptional talents looking for work and many that will work at rates favorable to your clients’ new reality. Start the hunt, hire people you couldn’t afford 12 months ago, whether full time, part time or as a contractor.

Now is the time to act. Now is the time to look at new possibilities. Now is the time to reinvent your business. 

Good luck!

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Ben Bradley is the managing director of Macon Raine, Inc. (www.maconraine.com).  He can be reached at ben@maconraine.com.

Robert Hamilton is the manager of Macon Raine’s interim marketing executive practice.

Macon Raine helps clients find new customers with agile sales, marketing and lead generation campaigns. Unlike advertising agencies, Macon Raine invests in each client’s success and even puts skin in the game to reduce cost and risk.  Want to learn how your lead generation efforts compare? Take the survey and find out.

A few weeks back, I emailed Pete Burgeson at Crowdspring and asked him to share his thoughts about what the agency of the future would look like. As background, CrowdSpring crowd sources graphic design. Companies put graphic design jobs out for bid on Crowdspring then graphic designers submit their ideas. The company picks a favorite, the designer gets paid. As you can imagine, this model threatens the livelyhood of some agencies. But some forward looking agencies are starting to explore crowdsourcing as a possible opportunity to reduce cost, better manage freelancers and possibly reinvent the way they engage with clients.

According to Pete, the agency model is going to be changing in a number of ways.  “One of the more interesting and relevant to us is going to be how I think agencies will interact with clients.  What we’re seeing is more and more shops crop up that have little to no interest in supplying the creative work in-house.  Sure, there will always be those shops – but they’re called creative shops and they’re very different.  The more ‘traditional’ shops are all trying to figure out how they can use more freelancers or (maybe one day) crowdsourcing to come up with ideation phase of the project.  From there, they can sort through the ideas and bring their true expertise to the table – strategy – and then hone in on a winner, perfect it and execute the shit out of it.”

http://i36.tinypic.com/11jq5nm.jpg

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The Chicken looks at the pig and says “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says “Good idea, what do you want to call it?”

The chicken thinks about it and says “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?“

“I don’t think so” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved“

Thus the moral of the story…

Pigs = Sales

Chickens = Marketing

Is marketing compensated for the success of lead generation efforts or are they only involved?

I love this. Found it here.

http://advice.cio.com/stephanie_overby/ibm_tries_to_patent_offshoring?source=nlt_cioinsider

******************************************
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say
I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he
drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you
had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look
every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or
drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: “Oh,
bull—-!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The
neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge,
the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons
two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to
work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home,
my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar
stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes,
at dinner, we’d ask how co me all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No
one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys
turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would
turn 16 first.

But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents
bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at
a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything,
and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bot her my father, but it didn’t
make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive.
She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following
year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The
cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the
cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the
family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on
maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator.
It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my
father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either
of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or
so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s C hurch. She would walk down
and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the
parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father
then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the
service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to
the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever
she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to
the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was
summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game
on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs
lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on
first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags
out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the
navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said
to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”

“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read
an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they
turn left in front of oncoming traffic.

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth
perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a
left turn.”

“What?” I said again.

“No left turns,” he said. “Think a bout it. Three rights are the same as a
left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support. “No,” she
said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.” But then she
added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car
keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few
years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have
a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father
would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what
he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101
because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep
exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to
give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was
wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and
newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know , Mike, the first hundred
years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that
Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”

“You’r e probably right,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.

“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him
through the night.

He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look
gloomy, he said:

“I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am
very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth
could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then
how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit
taking left turns. ”

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you
right. Forget about those who don’t. Believe everything happens for a reason. If
you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be
easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.”

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This article was written by ashley camillo (acamillo@bwmginc.com)

Great news here about sacrificing goats to get an airplane back into the air.

There was no mention of whether the sacrifice worked.

Perhaps animal sacrifices could be applied to marketing problems? But if you do use this as a tactic, we recommend that the sacrifice match the problem. If an airplane the size of a Boeing won’t or can’t fly, you likely need more than one goat. I’d try a dozen.

But of course animal sacrifice to improve marketing results probably won’t work here in the states anyway.

Someone would organize a committee to complain that there were too many goats being sacrificed or that the sacrifices weren’t done in a humane manner, or that we were using the wrong type of goat.

Plus, it is an election year. Talk about it too much and someone will take this the wrong way and form some new federal agency to oversee goat sacrifices (DGP – department of goat protection?).

However, if you are taken by the idea, and think you can apply it to your marketing challenges, I recommend…

http://www.goatfinder.com

Isn’t the internet wonderful?