Mark Twain once said that "the best kind of experience is other people's". He was right, says Pino Tedesco, a business leader from Australia and one of 60 to contribute to a book just issued in the UK.
One of Mr Tedesco's success secrets is to rent a hero. When times are hard, seek advice and ask yourself what would my hero do? If problems look too difficult to solve, ask yourself what Steve Jobs would do. Or Nelson Mandela.
Another contributor, Jon Clarke, who runs 360 Business Marketing, a UK company, says: "Succeed by being remarkable and ignore the doom merchants". He advises businesses to "go where the customers are: the places where they source products or solutions to problems." Next to this, I scrawled in big letters: HOW?
If you are a local shop, you cannot pick up your shop and move it to where the customers are. But the question is still relevant. If your shoppers are shopping somewhere else, you need to go there and find out what you need to do to win them.
If you do nothing else, says Mr Clarke, after reading his article, buy Purple Cow by Seth Godin, which will tell you how to grow sales by "being remarkable". Which got me to thinking whether I should recommend reading Lessons Learned from the Recession, the first volume from the Business Leaders Book Club, published by Ask the Experts. This book is not remarkable. It has bad typography. Many of the 60 business leaders who offer their thoughts use clichés and their thoughts seem unremarkable at best. Surely, I would do better to recommend Mr Godin's books?
However, I managed to shortlist eight articles that people who run small businesses would find interesting in next to no time. Even the articles I did not like were short and full of first-hand experience. These are people who run small businesses and who are successful. It is about learning from people like us. Business people that we could easily be. As Stephen Covey argues, don't read a business book as a book straight through but use it as a resource. This works for the Book Club offering, edited by Richard Norris and Mark Stephens.
Debra Zimmer writes about "retail knows first" and her experiences of setting up a furniture store in 2005 to complement her successful internet business. Amid lots of helpful advice you can use today, she notes two things:
Jonathan Jay's how to "beat the recession (and your competition) with marketing" is also thought provoking. "I realised that the mistake that other companies in my industry and almost every industry were making: we were talking about ourselves. Every piece of marketing I had done before had really talked aobut how good we were, and how customers or prospects should use our services, but we didn't quantify it. We didn't talk about it from a customer's or prospect's perspective. NABO made me change by approach." (NABO being his current business project.)
For retailers who like to learn by reading, this book may be a useful addition to their library. It is not pretty but it gives you insight into how people who run other businesses think. All business owners need to network with other business owners to build up their banks of good ideas and self-confidence. It is just like Mark Twain says.
One of Mr Tedesco's success secrets is to rent a hero. When times are hard, seek advice and ask yourself what would my hero do? If problems look too difficult to solve, ask yourself what Steve Jobs would do. Or Nelson Mandela.
Another contributor, Jon Clarke, who runs 360 Business Marketing, a UK company, says: "Succeed by being remarkable and ignore the doom merchants". He advises businesses to "go where the customers are: the places where they source products or solutions to problems." Next to this, I scrawled in big letters: HOW?
If you are a local shop, you cannot pick up your shop and move it to where the customers are. But the question is still relevant. If your shoppers are shopping somewhere else, you need to go there and find out what you need to do to win them.
If you do nothing else, says Mr Clarke, after reading his article, buy Purple Cow by Seth Godin, which will tell you how to grow sales by "being remarkable". Which got me to thinking whether I should recommend reading Lessons Learned from the Recession, the first volume from the Business Leaders Book Club, published by Ask the Experts. This book is not remarkable. It has bad typography. Many of the 60 business leaders who offer their thoughts use clichés and their thoughts seem unremarkable at best. Surely, I would do better to recommend Mr Godin's books?
However, I managed to shortlist eight articles that people who run small businesses would find interesting in next to no time. Even the articles I did not like were short and full of first-hand experience. These are people who run small businesses and who are successful. It is about learning from people like us. Business people that we could easily be. As Stephen Covey argues, don't read a business book as a book straight through but use it as a resource. This works for the Book Club offering, edited by Richard Norris and Mark Stephens.
Debra Zimmer writes about "retail knows first" and her experiences of setting up a furniture store in 2005 to complement her successful internet business. Amid lots of helpful advice you can use today, she notes two things:
- A leading company in home furnishings, Williams-Sonoma, had a stock price of $40 when she opened her store in August 2005. When she closed it in December 2008, its stock price was $7.85. "Had I thought to track their revenues at the time, I may have shut down sooner," she says.
- A venture capitalist friend told her "the number one thing that determines how successful a business will be is the growth of the overall industry". That is why for local retailers it is important to track the success of Booker and what the Institute of Grocery Distribution says about the outlook for the convenience grocery sector.
Jonathan Jay's how to "beat the recession (and your competition) with marketing" is also thought provoking. "I realised that the mistake that other companies in my industry and almost every industry were making: we were talking about ourselves. Every piece of marketing I had done before had really talked aobut how good we were, and how customers or prospects should use our services, but we didn't quantify it. We didn't talk about it from a customer's or prospect's perspective. NABO made me change by approach." (NABO being his current business project.)
For retailers who like to learn by reading, this book may be a useful addition to their library. It is not pretty but it gives you insight into how people who run other businesses think. All business owners need to network with other business owners to build up their banks of good ideas and self-confidence. It is just like Mark Twain says.
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