July 2012 Blog Posts (6)

How many customers would a business have if it didn’t know how many

customers it had in the past or didn’t have an inkling of how many

customers its competition had?



What if you started from ground zero and just invented the game/sport of

bowling?  And what if you woke up in the middle of the night and developed

the concept of “league bowling?”



How many customers would buy your new league bowling product?



What would be the first thing you would do…

I just watched the Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks display. Live from NYC.

Wow, what a great show.



(Embedded image moved to file: pic32286.jpg) Today we celebrated

Independence Day, though with so many different versions of America, it’s

hard to see how we are alike in anyway.  This is characteristically

American.  We have always been different. We’re from different places

around the world, speak different languages and of course we all…

The old Rod Stewart song is one of my favorite songs and as I was flying

back from Bowl Expo in Reno on an 11 hour flight, (courtesy of US Air) I

found myself listing some of the things that amazed me; some good and some

not so good.



I am amazed at:



    The amounts of money America’s companies spend on “customer service and

   customer retention training” to watch how it fails, almost always, in

   real life pressure situations.



    How some…

We get caught up in doing the little tasks; in doing the routine mundane

things that make our day disappear. We call it work.  We even say we “put

out fires.”  We say we’re a small business and we have to do it all

because we can’t afford more payroll hours. Or we can’t find good “help.”



The reality is if we look deep enough, the only time we do the real work

of acquiring and retaining customers is when we have to; in the fall and

the summer and now even in…

When you are an artist, designer, inventor, developer, architect, writer,

actor, singer, dancer, comedian, painter, composer or a creator of what it

is you create, you have to be very good at what you do or you have to be

very good at selling people to buy what you have.



Just having a good enough product isn’t enough anymore, you have to know

how to sell it to people who want to buy it.



So who wants to buy your bowling product anyway?



You’ve sold it…

I lost my cell phone today.



Not really lost it. It was found in a restaurant in Michigan. Fortunately,

a very kind and nice person (Mr. Jim Selke from Classic Lanes) is trying to

get to FED Ex as we speak to get me my phone by tomorrow.



I am sure that some of you have experienced the feeling of being suddenly

"phoneless" and completely unconnected. For almost 99% of my dear readers,

I expect that you count on your phone not just for business, but…