Herman School of Business
Two Words For You...
For those of you too young to remember the movie, THE GRADUATE, let me tell you what was revealed way back then…and I don’t mean just Mrs. Robinson’s body. As “Benjamin” celebrates his college completion his parents’ friends bustle about the party and at one point an older guy pulls Benjamin aside and gives him a one word secret to making a fortune…“Plastics.”
Buried in that one word secret to success is that fact that back then money was made in America making things. And many of those things were made of plastics. And while we use many things today made of plastics, and other materials as well, fortunes are not made in America manufacturing anything here…for today we buy 65% of our manufactured things from outside of this country. That means you have a much slimmer chance of making money manufacturing something (but I think there are some great opportunities here) and therefore you have to find other ways, actually easier ways, to make money in America.
There are two words I would whisper into Benjamin’s ear if we were at his graduation party today.
SERVICE and INFORMATION.
Service in America has almost disappeared. Give customers quality service and they will never leave you. Service, beginning with answering the telephone “with a smile” as one of my recent clients suggested. Lose that fandangled complex answering system with language choices, department choices, buzz me for emergency choices and just answer the damn phone! And do what you say you were going to do on time and at the price quoted. Give service to your customers at all times…they feed your family. Don’t “capture” a customer like my tree cutting guy did by showing up and starting the job and then leaving for a week to start three other ones…and then coming back a few hours a day as if he were working to complete my job. He could have come in on day one, cut the two trees down, ground out the stumps, and cleared the debris in three days…today marks two weeks since this project started.
Do you give your customers quality service right now befitting the fact that they are your lifeblood?
There are still people in this country with money. In fact, the ones with money have more of it than ever before. And do you know what they like to do with that money? They like having someone else do everything for them. I heard a great quote yesterday…if rich people could hire someone to die for them, you could eliminate poor people. Find a business that provides a service to people with money and you could do better than making something out of plastics.
Information is everywhere and no one knows where to find it. People want to know things, they want to get ahead of other people and they want information to help them. Now, the information has to be enough of a value that people will pay for it. I am not advocating that you be today’s snake oil salesman who packages up some data and a feel good message and after you take the money head out of town before people realize they paid for nothing.
If your business could share some INFORMATION with your customers that they don’t easily get elsewhere that would be a great SERVICE provided to them and hey, since we just combined the two words for today I think we can quit.
- Posted: 2 July 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Running a business
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