No. 10 October 2014

When animals relay solely on instincts to stay alive, they are restrained by their instinctual fear and their fear of the unknown.  They never reach their full potential.  Harvey MacKay says people do exactly the same thing.

“In cultures that depend on elephants for labor and transportation, it’s common to tie untrained elephants by their ankles to a bamboo tree, using heavy duty rope.  After three or four days of trying to free themselves, elephants give up.

From that time on they can be restrained by tying one leg to a small peg in the ground – something they surely could escape from with minimal effort.  But with little resistance, the elephants don’t try to get loose.  Despite their superior size, they have learned helplessness.  Do you let your past experiences limit your choices?”

Fear of failure also limits us from reaching our potential.  “The African impala can jump to a height of over 10 feet and cover a distance greater than 30 feet.  Yet these magnificent creatures can be kept in an enclosure in any zoo with a 3 foot wall.  The animals will not jump if they cannot see where their feet will land.  As with so many humans, extreme caution gets in the way of success.”

If you didn’t know you couldn’t do something, wouldn’t you attempt to do it?  “In the 1930’s a leading zoologist concluded after careful study that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, it should be impossible for a bumble bee to fly.  That is because its size, weight, and the shape of its body are all wrong in relation to its total wingspread.

Fortunately, no bumblebees have ever studied aerodynamics – so they just naively keep on doing what they’re incapable of doing.”

Habit often keeps us from reaching our full potential.  “Flea trainers have observed a predictable and strange habit of fleas while training them.  Fleas are trained by putting them in a cardboard box with a top on it.  As you watch them jump and hit the lid, something very interesting becomes obvious.  The fleas continue to jump, but they are no longer jumping high enough to hit the top.

When you take off the lid, the fleas continue to jump, but they will not jump out of the box.  Once they have conditioned themselves to jump just so high, that’s all they can do.  Many people do the same thing.  They restrict themselves and never reach their potential.”

Don’t let your instincts keep you from reaching your full potential.  Life is too short not to live it fully.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman once said, “A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." Which do you think will reach their goals, live a happy life, and achieve their dreams?

Imagine interviewing two people for a job opening you have.  Both are equally skilled, but one is always grumbling about how unfair life can be, while the other one talks about what wonderful possibilities exist.  Who would you want to hire?  Whom do you think would do a better job?

Naturally, you would gravitate toward the optimist.  If you choose the pessimist, you would be setting yourself up for plenty of aggravation and disappointment, not to mention the negative impact on your staff and customers.  Pessimism can bring everyone down, not just the person with the negative attitude.  And I believe that's when a pessimist is happiest!

Pessimists see life as one problem after another.  Optimists see life as one opportunity after another.  

Here's a story Harvey Mackay tells about how optimism can be life-changing:   

"Within a seven year time span, a woman's mother died, her husband divorced her, and she found herself living in poverty just one step away from being homeless.  In her spare time, she wrote a book that 12 publishers rejected. 

Finally one publisher accepted her book about a boy named Harry Potter.  And then she wrote a few more books, which became blockbuster movies, and even spawned a theme park.  

J.K. Rowling was an optimist who's now a billionaire.  How far in life would she have gotten by being a pessimist?"

09 September 2014

We've all seen the Quicken Loan ads on television.  They are the #1 online mortgage lender, growing from a startup to a 4,000-employee market leader over the past 25 years.  "They are consistently ranked in Fortune magazine's Best 100 Places to Work and they even won the JD Power award for the highest ranked customer service in an industry that is notoriously unfriendly."  If you ask Dan Gilbert, the Chairman and founder of the company about the key to their success, he'll quickly tell you it's all about the Quicken Loan "ISMs." 

An "ISM" is a suffix that refers to a strong principle or belief.  It is a set of values so powerful it drives the behavior of Quicken Loan's employees resulting in the company's "endless innovation, soaring profits, and market dominance." 

One ISM I particularly like goes like this:  "Every Customer.  Every Time.  No Exception. No Excuses.  Customers don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.  Could it be any clearer?  A great company is built one client at a time.  If you 'wow' every customer every chance you get, then they win and so do you.  It's as simple as that." 

Another ISM is "Ignore the Noise.  Will you allow noise to keep you from winning?  Noise could be from naysayers, something going wrong, sun in your eyes, ball took a bad bounce, dog ate your homework, someone cut you off on the way to work, etc.  A lot of things that seem serious at first glance turn out to be noise.  The noise may fluctuate in volume, but your determination to press on in spite of it (ignore it!) will make all the difference to you and our (company's success)."

Another ISM I like is " There is no 'they' here.  "They' does not exist here.  We are the 'they.'  One team.  United."

If you would like to read all 18 of Quicken Loans ISM's, use this link: 

www.quickenloans.com/press-room/fast-facts/our-isms/     You'll be glad you did.

In a service business like yours or mine, we all get to offer three kinds of service: good, cheap or fast.  Here's how we should present those options to our customers.  (1) Good service cheap won't be fast.  (2) Good service fast won't be cheap.  And (3) Fast service cheap won't be good.  You really can't say it much better than that!

Harvey MacKay believes persistence is a key to success and shares a few examples of persistence paying off.

"Few people had as difficult a time getting their invention accepted as Alexander Graham Bell.  Even U.S. President Rutherford Hayes said of the telephone in 1876, “… who would ever want to use them?” 

Chester Carlson, another young inventor, took his idea to 20 big corporations in the 1940s.  After seven years of rejections, he was able to persuade Haloid, a small Rochester, New York company, to purchase the rights to his electrostatic paper- copying process.  Haloid has since become Xerox Corporation.

Bette Nesmith Graham, in the 1950s, began using white, water-based tempera paint and a thin paintbrush to cover her typing errors. She sold her first bottle, originally called Mistake Out, in 1956.  Graham later patented the office product.  After starting out with just 100 bottles a month in sales, Liquid Paper was selling 25 million bottles a year when Graham sold it for a reported $47.5 million in 1979.

In 1927 the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, instructed student Lucille Ball, to “Try any other profession.  Any other.”  I wonder what would have made him say “I Love Lucy”?

Buddy Holly was fired from the Decca record label in 1956 by Paul Cohen, who was known as Nashville’s “artists and repertoire man.”  Cohen called Holly “the biggest no-talent I ever worked with.” 

Chuck Yeager, the famous test pilot, threw up all over the back seat on his first flight as a passenger.  He vowed never to go back up again, but eventually he reconsidered.  Then he became the first man to break the sound barrier.

These are all examples of ordinary people with extraordinary persistence.  None of these folks was famous or rich or even particularly successful before their big breaks.

We’ve all heard it before, but there really is no substitute for persistence.  In fact, persistence is sometimes as important as talent.  It must come from within.  You either want it or you don’t.  Giving up is not an option.  Don't be discouraged.  It's often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock."

My favorite Mackay example of persistence is this one:  "When I was first starting out, I asked a colleague I respected how many sales calls he would make on a prospect before giving up.  He told me, “It depends on which one of us dies first.”

08 August 2014

Several years ago, I wrote a column about "The Second Ten Commandments." Commandment two stated: “Thou shall not be fearful, for most of the things we fear never come to pass.” Every crisis we face is multiplied when we act out of fear. Fear is a self-fulfilling emotion. When you fear something, you empower it. If you refuse to concede to fear, there is nothing to fear.

Success usually depends on overcoming your fears: fear of taking a risk, fear of asserting yourself, fear of exposing your deepest self to other people, and ultimately, fear of failure. But for some people, the real fear is -- believe it or not -- success itself.

Fear of success can paralyze your efforts just as severely as fear of failure. Avoiding success may seem irrational, but success brings change, and change is often threatening.

Another concern is that co-workers may look to you for advice or assistance once you’ve proven you can succeed. You may lose control over your time or your privacy. Or, you might offer advice that doesn’t work as well as hoped. Then, your achievements might become suspect. And you certainly don’t want to make non-believers of the people you work with.

Another reason we fear success is because it can bring expectations of continued success. Achieving a major goal is hard work. What happens if people expect you to keep doing it indefinitely? Can you continue to produce?

Some people feel actually reaching a goal can be terrifying: What comes next? How will people react? What if your goal turns out to be meaningless? These worries can lead to procrastination and self-sabotage.

Benjamin Franklin had some timeless advice for those who are afraid of success, as well as failure: “The man who does things makes mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all -- doing nothing.”

Don’t let fear control you.

Seth Godin recently talked about “speedometer confusion” in his blog. That’s a term I wasn’t familiar with. He said, “The number on the speedometer isn’t always an indication of how fast you’re getting to where you’re going. You might, after all, be driving in circles, really quickly.”

“Campbell's Law tells us that as soon as a number is used as the measurement for something, someone will get confused and start gaming the number, believing that they're also improving the underlying metric, when, in actuality, they're merely making the number go up.”

Here are a few measurements Godin shares that are often the result of speedometer confusion. Remember -- the first measurement everyone tends to focus on, often has very little impact on the second, no matter how big the first is. For example, “Money versus Happiness; Income versus Skill; Facebook Likes versus Liked; Tenure versus Competence; Book Sales versus Impact; Twitter Followers versus Anything; Money Raised versus Votes Earned; Weight versus Health; Faster versus Better.”

Make sure the measurement you’re focused on really has value and meaning, and is not “just a number.”

Here’s a story by Aesop that I suspect you may not have heard before. It has a lesson that I think you will find relevant today, even though the story is very old.

“A man had two dogs: a hound, to assist him in hunting, and a housedog, who simply laid around the house. After a good day’s hunt, the man always gave the housedog a large share of his spoil.

One day, the hound, feeling much aggrieved at this, reproached his companion, saying, “It’s tough working so hard, while you, who never assists in the chase, luxuriates on the fruits of my exertions.”

The housedog replied, “Don’t blame me; it’s our master’s fault. For rather than teach me to work, he taught me to depend for subsistence on the labor of others.”

How do you feel about the hound and the housedog?

Harvey Mackay tells a terrific story about Alexander the Great.

“On his deathbed, Alexander the Great summoned his generals and told them his three ultimate wishes: 1) The best doctors should carry his coffin; 2) The wealth he had accumulated (money, gold, precious stones) should be scattered along the way to his burial; and 3) His hands should be left hanging outside the coffin for all to see.

“Surprised by these unusual requests, one of his generals asked Alexander to explain. His response: ‘I want the best doctors to carry my coffin to demonstrate that in the face of death, even the best doctors in the world have no power to heal. I want the road to be covered with my treasure, so that everybody sees that the wealth acquired on earth, stays on earth. I want my hands to swing in the wind, so that people understand that we come to this world empty-handed and we leave empty-handed after the most precious treasure of all is exhausted -- time.’

“Time is our most precious treasure because it is limited. We can produce more wealth, but we cannot produce more time. The ultimate mystery: None of us knows how much time we really have.”

Use the time you have left wisely.

No. 7 July 2014

In 2014, online sales in the United States are forecast to grow about 15 percent in comparison to the 5-percent growth predicted in traditional retail stores sales. This persistent growth of e-commerce reflects an alteration in the purchasing patterns of consumers. And it is making many big-box retailers reconsider business models that focus on real-estate portfolios for the generation of sales.

The result is that many retailers are allocating more of their capital expenditure budgets to the construction of their e-commerce platforms and supply chains rather than expanding their brick-and-mortar stores. For example, Home Depot recently announced that it would invest $1.5 billion this fiscal year in further developing its online store.

What happens when focus is on increasing sales by opening additional units? Big box retailers, including Home Depot, observed that adding more and more stores, each serving a more limited group of households, makes each store less profitable. No wonder Home Depot is increasing its focus on its online platform.

Keeping the big picture in focus, one can’t forget that Home Depot had 2,263 retail stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico at the end of FY 2013, generating 96.5 percent of its total revenue! Online operations generated 3.5 percent of total revenue at the end of FY 2013.

But online sales for FY 2013 grew at a 52.6-percent rate compared to a total net retail sales growth of 5.4 percent. So now you know why Home Depot is investing in online operations to grow future sales and not investing in increasing the number of store locations.

In a similar vein, Kiplinger’s Washington Letter says, “Troubles continue to mount for mid-tier retail chains like Sears, JC Penney, Office Depot, etc., retailers usually found near or in malls.”

Kiplinger’s suggests that mid-tier retailers’ “core customer base is rapidly deserting them. As retirement looms and households shrink for middle-income baby boomers, that group is cutting back on spending, and younger shoppers are not being lured by new products and displays. Other customers are increasingly opting to buy from discounter or upscale stores, squeezing mid-tier sellers from both ends. Intense online price competition hurts, too. Many stores will disappear, and some chains aren’t likely to survive.”

As more stores are shuttered, the big losers will be malls who will “have a harder time finding new tenants. Mall store rents will drop and so will foot traffic. Normally, 10 percent of mall storefronts are empty at any given time, but today it’s 15 percent to 20 percent.” The only “sure bet” to make is that change will continue, in the retail channel and in our industry. You can bet on it.

I bet most of you have never heard of Dave's Soda & Pet City, a seven-store chain based in Agawam, Mass. Ninety-eight percent of the business is pet-related and 2 percent is soda. Since its beginning in 1975, its owner Dave Ratner has built a customer-first business.

Here are a few customer service tips -- some familiar, some not -- Ratner uses every day: “1) When there is a problem, make it no problem. Make returns easy, solve customer problems in a nanosecond, and enable your employees to say, ‘What can we do to make it right?’ 2) Connect with your customers -- it's all about storytelling. 3) Develop emotional ties with your customers. Ratner gives gift cards to pet shelters, which then refer customers to his stores and publicize it. 4) It's not about metrics -- it's about being nice. At Dave's, if you aren't nice, you can't work there. Ratner writes personal thank-you notes on many occasions. 5) Do best what your competition does worst. Dave's focuses on having minimal out-of-stocks because its biggest competitor, Petco, has plenty of those. 6) Personalize everything you do. Dave's has its own brand of dog food, and on the back of the can is a message from Ratner: ‘Thanks for trusting me with the health of the creature you love more than anything in the world.’ 7) Be an expert resource for your customers. 8) Make sure all employees are working as a team. It's like a car with eight cylinders. If they are all good, everything is fine, but just one being down causes a big problem, and too much attention gets paid to that cylinder.”

Why don’t you try one of Ratner’s tips and see if it makes a positive difference in your business?

“When Janet looked at her pay stub, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that her company had deposited more than her normal wages into her bank account.

However, on the next payday, her paycheck was significantly less than what it should have been, and she went to her boss to complain.

‘I’m curious,’ her boss said. ‘Why didn’t you say anything when we overpaid you the other week?’

Janet responded: ‘I was willing to overlook one mistake, but two is pushing it.’”

I wonder what Janet’s boss thinks about her now?