Smart Business Strategy Finds Time and Space for Adaptability

Many different topics pop on when business owners are musing a wish list of skills they wished there people had, but adaptability is not generally one of them. In fact, adaptability could easily be a key factor in solving the constraints most businesses have, but usually solutions are seen as revolving around sweating more, and getting more done, and getting things done on time, and working faster and more productively... these do not fit so well when considering the virtues of adaptability.

Adaptability as a virtue revolves around change, and change is the antithesis of getting more done. But when technology is changing the world and how people buy stuff and how people discover what they want to buy and how people figure out what they need and what they want; doing things the same old way is only going to work so long.

Lessons to Learn from Evolution Survival of the Fittest is a concept from Charles Darwin we can all learn from. Charles said  animals evolved because of pressure on the species. It was not the strongest that survived, it was not the dominant species that survived, but the species  most adaptable to change.  What does this mean to you? If you are a small company growing, you can take heart that some of your big competitors are going to be quite happy to continue doing what has brought them success in the past, and not adapt well to the future; and you can grow and thrive by being smart and strategic.  If you are a dominant company now, I am hoping this note jars you out of complacency and helps you understand you cannot rest on your laurels but be developing your adapting skills

Understanding the virtues of keeping eyes open, being adaptable to change, paying attention on what is going on around you, being patient and bringing your team along to learn new skills and work at innovation, even if there is some failure; needs to be seen as a virtue. Time spent learning to adapt to new technologies, experimenting with new processes is a virtue, and a team of people used to taking time to be creative and innovative is a virtue.

This is vs the standard industrial thinking - centering activities around what works the best to get production done right now, and keeping the shoulder to the wheel and producing... this is the industrial mindset, keep doing more of what is working now and get those number up every quarter.

You may have discovered my ulterior motive, 
I want more businesses to understand the critical value of content creation and to find the space in the work schedule to facilitate it. But beyond my ulterior motive, nurturing the skill to be looking for ways to improve processes and taking the time to engage with change and be adaptable is a basic business strategy.

The problem is creativity takes effort and time and effort away from what makes money racks the lizard brain and time away from production costs real money. It is much easier to feel the cost of being adaptable that figuring out the intangible cost of staying put where you are.

Seth Godin is quite eloquent about the struggle between deciding to spend time being frustrated learning something new and just staying with the status quo.

The problem with evaluating the first fifteen minutes of frustration is that we easily forget about the 5,000 minutes of leverage that frustration earns us if we stick it out. 

This might be a good time to check out his point. Now he is speaking more to the individual artist or craftsman but it does not take genius to carry his point over to the entire team. The First 15 Minutes

The business environment right now is a good time for keeping one's eyes open as things change. You need to understand what is happening and the implications of those changes.

You need to understand what is attracting people and interconnections and figure out how to participate authentically there. You need to know who you want to talk to and figure out where they spend their time in social media. And you need to do it well. Useless and boring is as bad as not being there.

There is an art to using social media effectively. You have to understand where the people you want to meet, hang out and figure out how to contribute there with real value and make some new friends. You actually have to spend time and do some study to understand how any social media tool is used effectively or have someone you trust help you figure out how to use it effectively.

You also need time to discern well enough to miss the BS and innovate around Fundamentals, not be talked into the latest fad technology that will fade into the vapor. Innovation brought to you by sales people offering easy and effortless ways to do what you know takes effort, is BS.

The best example I see are creative ways to create worthless content. Lots of people are hired who turn brain farts into florid text, and rehash existing content online into new hash. Some even turn to other countries to find writing talent to create content. People are even working on content written by machines. Would not that makes things easy?

Optimizing technologies to aid the human hand, technologies to help with SEO and to sort keywords and phrases cannot turn worthless rehashed content into something useful. In the end, people have to read what you say and like it and respond. A back button is the ultimate exit from boring and useless.

you also need to be beware the fads in web design. That feature that everyone has. let me just pick on one in particular. I hate carousels. This new technology popped up a few years ago and most websites have this feature because it looks cool to the owner. I beat up on carousels here. 

Here is a really big deal. And I put it last because it was not about content creation. There are just the greatest software apps available today to help make all kinds of human activities easier. There are creat CRM systems for keeping track of prospects and customers and projects. There are great ways to communicate with the staff and staff with each other, to keep everyone on the same page at the same time, on whatever smart device they are using.

Such software takes the sweat of working with images, and creating content, and leaves the fun part; commenting and creating and telling stories.

Then the other side of the coin is learning to use the technology well. You probably know people who do not know how to use the power of their own word processor or their own spreadsheet and database engine. When you use a handy tool, like a hammer, you have reduced the handy tool to the level of a hammer and it probably functions poorly as a hammer. We talk about using software well here. 

And this gets back to Seth Godin theme above; do not let the little bit of work required to learn and leverage a sophisticated tool from helping you reap the added leverage of using the tool well.

Adaptability in the modern world is essential for survival. It is in the spirit of Daniel Boone who mosied into Kentucky paying attention to where he was going to stay out of trouble with the bears and stay out of trouble with the rightful property owners.

Smart business owners must learn to relax a little more and allow the space and time- i.e. slack to give people room to think, to innovate, to try new ideas.... we must become adaptable to change because change is coming and it is better to relish it and be near the front of the parade.

Being adaptable keeps you aware of the change in the winds and help you adjust to forces at work and keeps you on course.

OK, who has a thought here? What kind of experiences have you had that touch on the subject?

You need to Understand the Basic Buying cycle ehh Buying Cycles

If you don't understand the buying processes you encounter in your service niche, you do not understand or have an effective business development process.

Great marketers work at getting prospects into the buying cycle earlier and earlier and basically taking them off the market from all those bounders waiting around for a one night stand, or put more delicately, the quick sale.

The bounder mentality just does not stop to comprehend the steps towards a sale and basically begin their thinking at the time of the particular buyer is looking at reviews and figuring out who they are going to trust and buy from.

Now remember, this site is intended to help small service companies and manufacturers improve their business development and their sale processes. The greatest part of Internet advice you will ever see is oriented towards helping retail locations succeed and restaurants and every other location that caters to the whim of folks zooming around and enjoying shopping and catching a snack and perusing cool stuff... this is not you, and the majority of advice is tangential to what you need to do.

There are a lot of companies out there whose front page consists of promotional offers and "call now for service". Now, the front page is not critical to search unless all the site's information is on the front page, and not critical unless you are using online ads that dump people on the front page and this is a money robbing mistake.

These concentration on the quick sale is a misunderstanding of the buying cycle and the many different step that homeowners go through before they are ready to go shopping.

Web visitors first encounters with your content as they are searching for answers about something they are concerned about, or something they see in social media that touches on an inkling they have. It depends on the theme and the 100 different ways to draw attention to that theme that helps create a search connection between you content and their intent; and this is arranged by being high on the search page with Google.
What do I mean by theme? I mean a broad issue around which another 100 stories could be told which would relate back to the broader theme. Like indoor air quality or IAQ. We talk about dominating  critical themes elsewhere but here we are relating any particular theme to the buying cycle.

So someone is searching for reasons for a musty odor like composing vegetation in a bedroom. Now they are not interested in special offers, or "schedule your appointment today" they are looking for content that gives them a sense of what might be going on. Now content like this that is part of a story which relates the real life experience of a customer could easily be matched up by Google because of the quite specific terms. And they are not showing up on the front page; but a blog post that when prepared through a strategic content creation system is meeting this web visitor around their subject and matching their intent.

And here is the big win. When people find useful information they are appreciate. This phenomenon is called reciprocity and it is in our nature as humans. And so if your content is useful and you offer a hook that gets their attention and that matches well their next step in their buying cycle; well you are on your way to winning hearts and creating influence

The type of buyers most smart companies want are customers who are discerning, who want top quality and professional services more than they want the cheapest price. Quality workmanship and attention to the fundamentals of a repair and cheapest price do not really keep company because the cheapest price depends on corner cutting on the fundamentals.
Yes, you hear about cutting profit to the bare bones, and cutting down on expensive overhead... this is BS for cutting corners. Companies in for the long haul understand the cost of doing business and overhead and the cost of top quality workmanship and the fundamentals of repairs and, while they do sharpen their pencils around expenses they are not cutting corners to be the lowest price.

I did not mean to get on that riff on pricing there, but wanted to underline the utility of understanding the buying cycle and creating strategic content around the steps in the buying cycle. The web visitors you meet working the buying cycle well, are the discerning buyers so that you are giving your company the best chance to meet the discerning buyer you want; first.

And it is your web visitor to lose. But you don't lose them if you understand the next steps in the buying cycle and help them pass easily, even over a length of time to become your buyer and your lifelong customer.

Understanding the buying cycle and utilizing this knowledge to meet and win new customers is

• helping the chosen become aware, 
• helping the aware to better understand what is happening
• helping the chosen learn to discerning about the actions they need to take.
• give them useful information around which to make smart choices and avoid faux solutions.
• give them plenty of opportunity to explore your credentials
• give them plenty of opportunity to check you out and your team
• create your own unique systems to get them to connect to you, to stay in touch with useful information- social media? nurturing emails? a newsletter preferably a newsletter that you collaborate in... shared in email...

Understanding the buying cycle and thinking about strategic content marketing can help you win in the battle for the hearts and minds of your chosen web visitors, and you do this on a steady basis and you will have real problems on your hands. You will have to grow your company, and do more hiring, and train new managers... the small business owners work is never done.

Related Posts The Critical Role of Leadership in Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan Empowering People – Empowering Your Business How are you being Introduced to Future Customers?

All right so who has a point to add here? This is critical turf for business owners to be thinking about. Leave your thoughts below.

The Essential Role of Leadership in Establishing a Content Creation Process

There are all kinds of perceived obstacles and real roadblocks to instituting a smart strategic content creation strategy, and this is good news for the thoughtful leader.

• We need to know the roadblocks and the pitfalls to avoid failure. 
• We need to go understand the obstacles, both real and perceived, to assess reality. 
• We also need to understand the value of strategic content. We want return on investment. We will basically discuss the cost of creating strategic content and the value and then you can make your own decisions. 

It makes sense to get a true perspective on the value of useful content. Value created helps alleviate the anxiety of investing time and money and thinking. Great content and the useful leveraging of this content on the Internet, in social media, in online advertising, in newsletters, in nurturing email, off-line- is the big lever in the battle for business growth. Lets look at this value quite closely. 

There are many pitfalls you have to watch out for.
There are so many traps that let us create content that sucks. Useless content is easy, but it does take time, and it provides no useful results. Yet why is there so much useless content? We need to be clearly differentiating between the usual blah blah blah, the usual self promoting bilge and useful content that attracts the web visitors you would like to know better.

There are many obstacles that are just felt, that are just basically fear.
Creating a process for effective content creation can sound hard to do. It can feel like folly. There is this boogie man that keeps companies standing still when action is needed and the highest real risk is standing in place as the world changes how it buys stuff.

This is the problem of the lizard brain- the fight or flight response to any change from a ancient psyche that kept us safe when the dangers were real not imagined but, today keeps us standing on the virtual railroad tracks as technology changes the way we do business at at rapid pace.There is the tyranny of the daily urgent and unimportant that can displace the attention to the important but not urgent.

There is often an overbearing sense that everybody is busy now or that we need to concentrate on the tasks that make income right now.  A strategic content creation strategy that interlinks useful content is important, and is a good investment and needs to be engaged now as the way people buy, is changing. But even when this importance is understood, the daily urgencies intervene, and the usual rush to get something done, pushes for pragmatism right now. Leaders with vision cannot be satisfied with industrial thinking but can take the time, to find the space to fit in what is important.

There is actual disruption in creating a process to create useful content
 but this disruption of existing process is no different than say, moving from a paper working environment to a paperless environment. It takes a vision from leadership who understand the tremendous value of having shared docs and not having to depend on tracking and sorting and filing pieces of paper. Moving forward, requires a description of the process, and maybe even a procedure for dealing with issues which will arise. Right from the start we plan well to minimize possible disruption.

The actual changes are first led by the early adopters and then there are some laggards on the other end who take longer. And when all is said and done, there is a big gain in productivity and an improved ability to manage data and you are better able to care for customers.

Useful content requires a team and we lay out a rough outline for creating useful content here.

Leadership is responsible for the vision forward. Leadership must create the tenor, must create the safe environment for people to participate here, to share ideas, and move forward. And Leadership must not allow the daily urgent to interfere. Leadership must have the patience to let the team develop some new habits and acquire some new perspective. It is all good. Maybe you need to go back and review the section of actual value of content. This is the big tool with which to build and sustain business development.

Differentiating Between Useful and Useless Content

Useless content is rehashed content that is the same old blah blah blah shared from competitor to competitor. So much of it sounds like some boring grade school teacher reciting laundry lists of facts and caveats and advice in a monotone. If your content does not grab your visitor and wake them up and get their attention, it is useless.

Useless content can also be all about the company written with the expectation that the web visitor is dazzled and impressed with your glittering reputation and exciting  intonation of your company virtues and high levels of experience and expertise that you like to talk about.

Useless content is all the stuff on a website that gets between the web visitor and the information that they are actually look for. This often starts with the usual carousel of images that lets the web designer appear to have worked his fingers to the bone. Website owners love these too, because they get to show off what is important to them. Always remember that effective websites are customer centric, not there to stroke the ego. I really dislike carousels.

Useful content is not the usual rehashed blah blah blah but is useful. It is not the writing exercise of english majors writing sentences on subjects they actually know nothing about, but the stories of people engaged in solving problems and creating solutions for customers.

And talking louder does not make boring information any more useful. More volume does not make boring information more impactful. More social media microphones just makes more noise. Extra tweets just make you harder to avoid. . Therefore there is great power is speaking useful information in a still small voice and earning the right to speak as early in the coming conflagration as you can.

Compelling and useful content requires the participation of experts, of sales people, of people in the front office who are dealing with people, their questions, their misunderstandings, their concerns. We describe the only reliable means to get great content here.

We discuss the actual content creation process here. Here is how great content can be created.

So why does useful content happen so seldom? 

This is a critical question, because some of you are going to see the light and decide to step out and be remarkable and you cannot step out and be remarkable unless you can identify what is happening now. We work through the process of how useless content is created here. Maybe you need to look this over and see if anything in particular sounds familiar.

 We talk about antidotes to the industrial brain here.

This is a critical battle for leadership to win. Leadership must be engaged in a strategic content creation system to make content truly effective. It is not something to be left to vendors, or contractors, or the whims of whomever.

Useful content is the only kind of content worth having. Stop and think. Easy brainfart content is a waste of time and it perpetuates the same waste into the future.

Here are some related posts addressing issues surrounding useful content. Understanding the Role of Feedback in Creating Great Content Great Content Matches the Intent of the Web Visitor Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents

OK, who has a thought here? Who have I offended? Feel free to set me straight.

There is no more Worthless Website Feature than a Carousel

I consider the image carousel that is a common feature on most service company websites as the most intrusive website component interfering with the efforts of your web visitor to find the information that they are actually look for.

People come to your website with a particular intention. They usually have a question. This is the earliest stage of the buying cycle. And the first thing they see is a big carousel that fills they entire view port of their desktop; we won't even mention the small screen "whack a mole" effect as the screen starts exchanging out images.

People want an answer to their question. They do not want to sit through your slideshow to figure out if what you are so eager to show off has anything to do with their quest.

Now carousels are popular because the people who pay for websites are not actually using the website and are all excited to show off what they think is important. And the web designer gets to appear as if he has worked his fingers to the bone, by making something twinkly.

Carousels create all kinds of dismal effects for your website.

So a good share of web visitors hit the back button and return to the search engine where they figure the perfect answer is at the next click.  So, what is the result of this quick return to Google?

Well, google notes that their searcher did not get much help from your content and bounced back and the result  is that your page  is denigrated with google as useful to Google's clientele, and I guarantee Google cares about their users.

Now some of your web visitors are intrepid and so they find something promising to click on and the next page, looks exactly the same! Is the site broken? Oh, no they quickly figure  out that the carousel is still here filling the view port and they get to scroll down to actually find real information around the carousel.

The carousel  is a disaster and serves no useful purpose. 

You don't have to take my word as truth on carousels, here is another opinion. This is great. Jared W. Smith doesn't really like them either. http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/  He has his own set of reasons.

Is there a place for a carousel?

Maybe, if you are offering a smorgasbord of entertainment and your visitor is perusing your offerings.  If you are doing this, you are on the wrong website.

The purpose of this website is carrying on a dialogue with smart small business owners who are in a service business, or maybe you are a small manufacturer. None of you should be  or are in the entertainment business.

If people are coming to your site for information, to check you out from a referral, or figuring out if they can trust you, a carousel is a bit of hubris that stands in the way of your web visitor finding value on your site. You are expecting them to patiently wait while your carousel takes them on your flight of fancy rather than helping them with their quest.
And you are losing web visitors. And maybe your referrals are wandering off.

Content strategy is serious business. It helps you create new customers. When the strategy works. Bad design issues don't help.

Anybody want to defend carousels?

The Critical Role of Leadership in Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

We are going to jump squarely to the role of Leadership in business development but first it needs to be said that there is no real separation like this in the real world. Every aspect of quality leadership bears on business development,

• the care and nurturing of the workforce, 
• finding slack to observe and be aware of the important and find time for the important
• planning for slack with the team, so they have time to fit in observation and sharing ideas for innovation, and intelligence gathering and having the energy and attention to care  for customers and not always be trying to catch up - we talk about the importance of slack here.

but this website theme relates to business development as a concentration. Therefore,

We must understand the fundamentals of a strategic online marketing presence.

First, you must realize how important having an effective online presence actually is in the 21st century. You must also realize how competitive this space is; although, if you use your head and have a strategic plan, vs. just being busy and playing with the constituent parts, the task is not as daunting.

It is essential to understand how important it is because an effective online plan takes time for planning and thought. It is so easy to fail towards easy but worthless content. We need to easily differentiate what is useful and what is useless.

Strategic thinking like this can run counter to our gut instinct and past experience where we feel we must focus attention on the immediate work that pays the bills. We need to stop and relax and use our wits. We really need to stop and be aware of the intangibles like opportunity cost.

Leadership is responsible to the vision and the plan for creating content. This is such an important issue that we treat the subject separately. 

Related Posts Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents Valuing Intangibles is Difficult but Essential How do we create compelling content? The Pictures on the Refrigerator door

Strategic Content Finds Space for Leadership to Explain What is Important to them.

Content allows us to underline the owner's and the company's core values and frame the company's attitude of why they are in business, and what is important to them. You can create and share your esprit de corp on your website. These core values can color every aspect of the business and reflects the core beliefs of the company; that is, the business owner.

Content must be understood as having a variety of strategic purposes. We cover various strategic purposes on this website. Content can be funny and entertaining, but we do not just add content for entertainment. We have serious work to do. The purpose of content must match the strategic interests of thoughtful leadership. 

You realize that your company is working to build a community of people who trust you and who buy from you and refer you to their friends. This cannot be bought but is built through sweat equity. It takes time and attention and careful thought and patience. This is a good space to understand intangible costs. 

You must understand the two key concepts of meeting new prospects online. This is 

1. connecting your strategic content to the search queries of your chosen customers. You are not working to capture a chosen theme by writing 100 posts on a given broad subject, but 100 posts that define and illustrate and introduce and deal with the chosen broad subject. I am being a bit abstract here, but this is a broad strategic overview.

2. understanding the power of attractants in social media to capture the attention of people passing by.

Understanding the buying cycle and the intent of web visitors during each part of the buying cycle. You must also understand that effective content must address actual aspects of the buying cycle and be nuanced so that our content matches the intent of our chosen web visitors.

And there is huge power by collaborating with chosen reliable professionals around subjects in common. I will elaborate on this subject more later, but it is rather strategic marketing 2.0 and content creation 2.0 and a bit early at this point to bring it up.

What is missing here? I know I have been a bit fast and loose here; but there are business owners out there who have a pretty good grasp of aspects of strategic marketing; but are missing other parts of the tool box completely. And it is so easy to be so busy as to not really see the changes coming. And the changes coming are good, if you are on the train; not so good if you are walking on the track.

Feel free to ask a question, if anything here is confusing.
Let just think of this as a draft list that we will return to later.
Feel free to add your thoughts here. 

Recognizing Fear and the Lizard Brain

We have these great big brains. I am always amazed at the accomplishments of people working inside their heads and creating wonders.

We also have these great big lizard brains. Our lizard brain protected us during the epochs when we were being chased as a food source. Today our lizard brain- for the most part, just stands in the way of creating change.

This is OK if we account for our lizard brain and understand its impact on decision making. Seth Godin speaks eloquently on the subject of decision making and the lizard brain. We need perspective and we need rational processes to make decision based on what we know and what we can infer from experience and testing. But too often we just let our gut feeling and our lizard brain stop us in our tracks.

Now why am I making a big fuss about the lizard brain?

Because the concept of giving employees more slack in not conventional thinking and is just the type of concept which gets the lizard brain stirred up.

The concept of putting energy into a strategic content creation system requires higher level thinking that must contrast costs in dollars out of the wallet now for nice ROI in the near future but gains that are much more intangible....  and not so urgent.... but really important. For a business owner to have an effective internal conversation on either of these subjects, plus many more; he or she certainly has to have the lizard brain in his cage.

If we don’t account for our Lizard brain- it is not serving us well. It just might be causing us to stand still when the really smart thing would be to move.

The lizard brain does not differentiate between perceived risk and actual risk. In fact, the lizard brain merely fears change.

Dealing with the Lizard Brain

You can get the lizard brain under control by understanding your nervous tension, and rationally studying what is bothering you. You are seeing amorphous risk which needs to be drawn out and understand and you need a determination of what kind of action step would be relatively risk free and also provide a step forward to where you want to be.

Taking action that is not just guesswork or precipitous; but on the boundary between experience, and the hinterlands of change; makes sense.

You just need an actual plan that takes the first step and the second step and the 3rd step and then work in an analysis of what is happening.

And you can also determine what is a failure point. We learn from mistakes if we pay attention. And then we are smarter when we start again.

Oh, and here is a thought. What was the most expensive mistake you have ever made? It just might be related to hanging on to old technology that no longer was paying off. Like the Yellow Pages... the lizard brain kept you there long after you should have cut your losses. I am sure that is not true; but if partially true, but maybe there is a lesson to learn here helping to define an issue with the lizard brain.

You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes, make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success - on the far side of failure. - IBM founder - Thomas J. Watson

Bold is more fun.... when you have the risk well managed, of course.
What are your thoughts here? Have you ever had to deal with a lizard brain?
I am a salesman. I am often muttering about lizard brains. :)