Hopefully, by now, you know that you cannot just be a product source and expect to command a premium price or a loyal customer base. Quite simply, if you don’t want to be commoditized, don’t be a commodity. Think about why your customers buy, and work to give them a reason to buy from you.…
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If you are like most business owners, you want to make money from the efforts of others. A lot of people say they own their own businesses, but many really don’t own businesses at all. They just own jobs. Here’s the test: Can you fly to Hawaii for three months and tell someone else where…
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Competitive research is important, but it can be hard to find time to do it. Trusting someone else to summarize for you can leave important holes in your understanding of competitors’ strategies and processes. I want to make sure I’m clear about who I am and where I fit into the marketplace, as well as…
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Instead of a question today, I’m going to pass along a tip from a client. I’m always interested in new ideas to simplify the accounting, bookkeeping and order management systems for ad specialty distributors. And recently, my client, Bruce Cunningham of Great Ideas in Santa Fe, N.M., shared an idea that reduces paper usage and…
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Be bad at something, perhaps a few things. Consider being downright awful at one thing. Why be bad at something? Simply put: So you can be great at the things that matter. Consider Amazon. It isn’t great at “in-person” customer service, even though it is great at customer service. In fact, it offers some of the…
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In my last article, I discussed the No. 1 reason why most people in our industry aren’t rich. In that article, I stated that there is no good reason for people in our industry to make less than $500,000 per year income unless they choose not to. To some, that may sound like a lofty,…
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Question: What do you know about buying groups? Answer: There are variations of buying groups in our industry—from a couple of distributors banding together loosely to companies that offer other services and approaches. To answer this question fully, I went to Jamie Coggeshall, president of AIMastermind (AIM), a group that purely is a buying group.…
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Some day, I’m going to change! Many adults still are struggling to find out what they want to do. Oh, they’re busy. But mostly they react and react and react, and never really set their own directions. They expend a lot of energy trying to make a living and spend little time making a life.…
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Every business has metrics, but too many use vanity metrics that make them feel good about what is being done rather than providing insights to be better. For example, we’ve all suffered from the call center that is so focused on wrapping up the call rather than resolving the problem. Why? Because the more calls,…
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There’s one reason why most people in our industry aren’t rich. At the end of the day, the business we are really in is the “know, like and trust” business. That’s right. Our real job as industry professionals is to get people to know us, like us and trust us. It’s true if we are…
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