Business Decisions

As an ethical business owner, you try to provide the best product and service you can to all your clients and potential clients.

If you are a sales person (a good one) you'll do the same.

Every day, I have to remind myself that sometimes that is just not possible.

The key to success, in my opinion, to any business is appropriately understanding when to be willing to lose. You have to be willing to understand that you can't (and shouldn't) win them all.

Two and a half years ago, before I started Tribute Media, I wrote a simple blog post on the concept that if you try to be everything to everyone you'll end up being nothing to no one (I know the grammar problem... but you can read the post here.)

The challenge for a business owner with everything on the line (the same goes for a salesman trying to make a commission) is to remember that it is okay to say no. It is okay to lose a deal once in a while.

I am not suggesting that you go out of your way to lose a deal. What I am saying is if the deal doesn't work for your company, you need to be willing to walk away.

As a simple example... continue reading...

People complain about the economy. People say that, “because of the economy businesses will fail.”

The evidence used to back this up are the high numbers of layoffs that companies make or lower of stock prices. In some cases, hundreds of people are laid off at a time. In some cases thousands at a time. Sometimes stocks plummet.

I argue that the economy isn’t the problem.

I argue that the real problem is business decisions. Business leaders make poor business decisions because they don’t understand their customers, don’t understand their vendors or just plain don’t understand their own business.

Let me give you an example that supports this. continue reading...

In 1992 when I left high-school and needed a Job, I found that AT&T was hiring. They were hiring for their leased phone division. Since the breakup of MaBell in 1984, AT&T maintained the leased telephone division.

The primary aspect of my job was to convince people that leasing telephones was a viable thing to do. (dumb, huh?) And I was very successful. I would lease cordless phones at $50 per month... and you could go and buy one at the time for $100.

I would very often get calls like, "I just noticed that I had a bill from you all for $4.95 for a Princess Phone. I don't have this phone, please cancel my bill"

Upon further discussion with the client, we had been billing them since 1984 for that phone at $4.95 per month because prices never changed. (Our records didn't go before the break-up) Nearly $500 over the 8 years. They often would not have seen the phone in 5 or 6 or more years... yet we were still billing them and they kept making the payment. continue reading...