Tag Archives: advice

August 3, 2018 · 11:20 am

David And Goliath

I’d like us to think about David and Goliath this Foodie Friday. In the food service world, there are a few Goliaths – McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks to name a few. There are far more Davids – everything from mom and pop restaurants competing in the same quick-service space to regional chains. It’s interesting to see how the little guys try to compete with the big ones and there is a lesson in that for any of us in business.

I’m often surprised at how some Davids think they can just “me too” their way into success by following the strategies and tactics of the big guys. I guess the thinking is that one wouldn’t have to grab a whole lot of share from a big guy to have a wildly successful business. They drop pretty large crumbs.

I was reading something recently that reinforced my surprise. It’s a study by Sense360, a restaurant consultancy. It found:

McDonald’s has been admired for its value-oriented strategy that’s led to its market dominance and resurgence. Many QSRs have tried to replicate McDonald’s winning strategy, with little success. That’s because they’re copying the wrong things and not taking away the key lessons that would lead to a better result.

What McDonald’s and other Goliaths do is to formulate very detailed customer personas. They identify key consumer attributes and build their strategy around attracting the core customers they’ve profiled again and again. Those personas are NOT the same across different brands, so trying to use strategies designed to attract them may not fit your customer profile at all. For example, the quality of food at McDonald’s is, according to the study, a very minor reason why their customers go. Advertising the quality of your food as a way to grab a McDonald’s customer is going to fall on deaf ears.

Obviously, the Starbucks customer has different concerns and priorities than the McDonald’s customer, which is exactly what the study found. Therein lies the lesson for any of us. What we all need to be doing is looking internally and see what we can do well that is different from what our competitors are doing and which resonates with OUR customers, not theirs. What will give my business and my brand an opportunity rather than going head-to-head with someone who has more resources than me, often moves faster to adapt to market changes, and has a different customer anyway.

David beat Goliath because he managed to hit him in a weak spot and not because he went after his strength or waited for him to tire. That’s the sort of thinking we need to incorporate in our business planning, don’t you think?

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June 27, 2018 · 11:12 am

Can We Distinguish Fact From Fiction?

How good are you at distinguishing fact from fiction? As I’ve written before, I think that is one of the two most important things anyone can learn in their professional (and personal) lives, with the ability to express your thinking clearly orally and in writing being the other. The folks over at The Pew Research Center studied whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it. The results aren’t particularly surprising but they also are a good reminder to any of us in business.

First, the results. I’m summarizing here but you really should read the entire study – it’s fascinating and gets to a lot of what’s going on in the country today:

The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion…Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.

In other words, confirmation bias comes in quite a bit of the time.  I raise this because I think it happens all the time in business as well. We receive data that doesn’t support the direction in which we’re taking the business but we reject it as biased. We get complaints from customers but dismiss them as opinion even when there are facts to support the customer’s unhappiness. It all comes back to what the study measured – many of us can’t distinguish fact from fiction.

We need to pay attention to the source of what we’re hearing. Does the data come from an unbiased, third party or is it an opinion? Is the person who is telling you something doing so based on first-hand experience or are they just repeating something they’ve heard elsewhere? Do multiple sources independently report the same information (not quoting one another, in other words) or are you basing a business decision on a single source? If you’ve spent any time in business, you know that even “trusted” sources – your analytics, your financial reports and others – can be manipulated. Always seek the unvarnished, fact-based truth and learn to ignore opinion unless it’s labeled as such. It’s hard to do that, but you’re up to the task, right?

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June 11, 2018 · 10:42 am

Help Wanted

It’s June, the month of newly-minted college graduates entering the workforce. There will be a fair amount of job-seeking going on and today I want to spend a minute to reflect on a few things I’ve learned over the years both about finding a job and filling one.

First, finding one. Obviously, the way the job market works has changed since I graduated college several decades ago. Job websites and LinkedIn didn’t exist and the process is way more efficient now. The problem is that so has the nature of work because business itself has been reshaped. The disintermediation of almost everything has meant the nature of hiring needs has changed. Retail jobs have moved from store clerks to engineers who help with online inventory management, customer experience, and other jobs that didn’t exist in the retail sector back in the day. Ride-sharing has created a different sort of cab driver (a popular job for many when we couldn’t get other work), one that doesn’t require a hack license but does require that you have access to a car.

What hasn’t changed about looking for that entry-level job is that you need to have a willingness to do damn near anything. My first job was making slides for presentations at a trade group. Yes, I was an honors graduate with degrees in English and Education and I had no interest in making slides: I wanted to write. I also wanted to eat and to get my foot in the door. I’m always surprised when I talk with a young person who feels many entry jobs are beneath them.

The other thing that hasn’t changed, and this applies to both sides of the hiring desk, is the skills required. I always looked for people who were smart, who could express that intelligence both orally and in the written communication we had, and who seemed like self-starters. Those candidates are the ones who will learn on the job and perform, and I have many examples of that in my hiring. I’d add to the list that the candidate should be able to handle disruptions well. Every business has been or will be disrupted and, therefore, the nature of every job will change as well. Society and business are constantly getting more efficient – more things will be available to more people for lower overall costs – so the hiring and job-seeking processes need to mirror that. Does yours?

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