Business Rant

Automated phone systems are a pain in the ass of anyone who has been forced to ever sit through the inane messages of – “we apologize for the long wait time – your business is important to us, etc, etc."  Or the endless mailbox system, commonly associated with a merry-go-round or daisy chain.  For ________press 1, for ________press 2 and so on and so forth.  You press 1 or whatever number and then are confronted with another set of instructions to press another series of numbers. 

 Not one of those numbers is associated with a live person.  The one I love is: "To discuss your account press 2, then you are given another set of options breaking your account into further sub options.  If you are looking for information on the billing, you first have to go through an entire dissertation of my account balance and last payment information.  I already know this, I want to talk to a human.  By the time I do get a live person, I want to strangle someone. 

Then there is the one that has voice commands.  I found out they don't respond well to expletives, but you do get a live person after you have uttered a few.  Thanks to Readers Digest for that tip. I now have a use for my short temper. 

Who invented these things?  Nazis?  If you own a company that uses one of these systems, I will bet you that you have NEVER had a customer call you and compliment you on the  efficiency of your wonderful answering system.  If anything, you have customers who are seriously doubting ever using you again for service. 

Think about it. 

Economy

Do you wonder where we are going as a country.  Perhaps this parable, that came from Jennifer Stewart’s newsletter “The Write Way” [jennifer@write101.com] will give you some ideas. 

It is the month of August in a small country town. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town:
* He enters the only hotel, lays a $100 note on the reception counter as a gesture of good will, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one
* The hotel proprietor takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
* The butcher takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the pig farmer.
* The pig farmer takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
* The supplier of feed and fuel takes the $100 note and runs to pay his debt to the town's florist who had supplied flowers for his daughter's wedding on credit.
* The florist runs to the hotel and pays off her debt with the $100 note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms she rented to store and prepare her flowers.
* The hotel proprietor then puts the $100 note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
* The rich tourist comes down from inspecting the rooms, and after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, takes his $100 note and leaves town. No-one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

Doesn’t this sound like our present economic bailout condition to you?  If you think about it long enough, this is exactly how the economy works. The idea is - we get paid so we pay our bills and everyone is happy.  So where’s the problem?  The problem is the chink in the armor that in this parable leaves undisclosed.  The chink is the person who doesn’t pay.

This is what happened to our economy.  People who received loans on homes they couldn’t afford, stopped paying. Therefore, the lender couldn’t make their payments to their investors, and the investors – little mom and pop, couldn’t make their payments.  I know there are a lot of reasons / excuses why people stopped paying, but the bottom line is - they stopped paying.  We hit the slippery slope and simple economics took over.  They had no money set aside for a rainy day, but personal savings is another problem that has been compromised by government. 

Money – not at work – is useless paper.  Stuff it into a mattress and it is worthless in terms of buying power.  In other words, if you are not paying off your debts, but holding onto that bill, then you are holding onto worthless paper.  It has no value otherwise  This is why they say you have to spend money to make money.  Oh, you want to hold onto it – i.e. save it – for that rainy day.  Hey - it’s pouring outside – pay the debt.   

But where the real problem comes in is what that paper represents.  People want to think that this little piece of fancy paper is backed up by gold sitting in some vault somewhere.  The mere fact that we hold that paper in our hand, is our assurances that we can go down to that vault and exchange it for that piece of gold or silver. 

We now know that in many cases, the vaults are empty – they were always empty, and people printed a whole lot of that paper that isn’t backed by anything except a promise.  (They didn’t print “Promissory Note” on the paper for nothing.)  We built this universe on promises and feel cheated when someone breaks their promise, i.e. quits passing paper.  The solution – quit breaking promises and quit printing more paper.       

The parable says it all in the end.  No one earned anything but the whole town is out of debt.  In reality – it should end with “until tomorrow.”

Where is the solution?  The solution comes about when the government, instead of paying off debts owed by someone else, gets smart and invests in new technology, new plants and new small businesses.  If the government is going to get into business - regardless of our wishes, then get into the right end of business. 

These new companies can now afford to hire people who previously had no paper to pay off their debts.  In other words, get the government out of the debt business. They are baling out the wrong end of the sinking ship.   They are simply passing paper and it’s already dawn on the inevitable tomorrow.     

Copyright 2009 - Gary A. Clark

Marketing

$21.19 for WATER and the buyers don't even know the source (Evian spelled backwards is Naive.) It’s a good thing we don’t put any of this stuff into our gas tanks.

But the real issue – and the reason why I love e-mail marketing is simply that someone calculated the cost of the ink at ……………$5,200 a gal. No that’s not a misprint.

Therefore, I did some more calculations and figured that if I did a lot of snail mail marketing - which you will eventually shred, using the above costs as a relative measurement, I would have to raise my rates to over $450.00 an hour just to break even. So will every commercial writer, copywriter, marketer, or consultant in business, which would drive the above prices even higher.

Get the picture? E-mail marketing is saving the planet, sometimes informing you of things you would have never known but make for good conversation, and allowing companies to keep low hourly rates. E-Mail marketing is what introduced many of us to the social network trend that is so hot today.  Now all you need to do is call me and I can show you other ways to think about business, without killing your ad budget.

Oh, one last thing. The biggest voice against e-mail marketing are the companies who do print advertising. It’s a false fight, and I understand. For the most part I agree with them. However, print advertising is not going away, and e-mail marketing is not putting a substantial dent into their business income. It only appears that way, because print advertisers have not yet figured out a way to work with the e-mail competition. They want to fight with it. Here are some stats that will further help solidify my position.

- For every dollar spent on email marketing, marketers can expect an estimated $48.29 ROI. (DMA 2007 dollars)
- Email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs. (Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2007 report Sept. 2007)
- Small business Email Service Provider Constant Contact recently went public and has a market cap hovering around $800,000,000. Yep, 800 million!
- One email marketing industry leader (Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source Inc.) says email marketing is a $3 billion industry.

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Marketing1

So he tied her up and went golfing.

Now this is a joke (I think) but communications is the key to the development of the human race.  Misinterpretation of what is being either desired, said or implied will often result in an unexpected and undesired outcome. For example, I recited this joke to my wife expecting a laugh. What I got was the “look.” I know what that look means. My mother used to give me that look. That is where wives learned it.

Here’s a live example:

I want to tell you about a "superior" software product developed from 20 years of knowledge by a leading professional in the field. I want to show you this time saving, much-needed product. Get it and it will save your company one day.

What do you want to know? What information do you need before you are ready to grant me the time to show it to you?

Do you want to know what programming language it is written in? How many developers it took to produce it, or years it took to develop it? How about the color of the screens? Do you want to know that it uses a relational database?

No. None of this really matters to you. What really matters is what it can do for you. What do you need it for? Without that information – I won’t get the time of day off you.

Even if I manage to sell it to your company, without this knowledge, it remains nameless, sits in the corner and fails to do what it was intended to do. Instead of helpful software, you have shelfware.

However, if I told you what it could do for you, how it could make your job so much easier, so much faster and more accurate, or so much better, then you would use it.

If I told you that by using this software, you would gain new respect in the firm, perhaps a position and a raise, would you understand why it is important to use it?

What if I told you how to use it? What if I gave you examples, and promised to help you practice using it so that you were the most proficient in it?

The only thing that would cause you to pull it off the shelf - is if it was good for you.

Why didn’t they sell you this?

Ever wonder why game software sells so well. It’s because they get YOU into the position of being the hero. You wipe out all the monsters, you kill all the bad guys, destroy all the demons and end up rescuing someone – who is very grateful to you.

There is a lot of bloodshed, body parts fly everywhere, but eventually – you – prevail. Don’t you wish your program, service or product could create that same feeling of triumph in your customers.

Are there solutions? Yes – but for those, you are going to have to call me if you want them immediately. Or, you can follow this blog. As we go on, the answers will be forthcoming.

A fast way is to look up my contact information on my website at http://Write4Me.net/and call me. I look forward to talking with you.

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Copyright 2006 - Gary A. Clark  Gary Clark is a Freelance Commercial Writer and Web Content writer who for 25 years has been both a Consultant and instructor of Small Business Entrepreneurship. He can be reached by e-mail at GAClark@Write4me.net, or by phone at 719-536-0505- Mon thru Fri / 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (MST)

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