Tag Archives: business thinking

October 6, 2015 · 12:13 pm

The Flashlight You Need

No one likes to wander around in the dark, tripping over furniture and the odd, misplaced shoe.  It’s why every phone comes with a flashlight app, right? On that note, I’ve ranted a number of times in this space about the need for every business to use a flashlight – the need to measure. “Measure what?” you ask? Like any good consultant, I’ll tell you that there is no one right answer to that. I can, however, tell you how to go about figuring it out.  

It’s more than answering “what’s important.” Obviously, growing revenue and profit is the standard answer. It’s the next layer – what makes those things happen – where we begin to figure out our Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). I like to start with current customers. How many of them are we retaining? What’s our churn rate? How do you reduce the attrition rate, and what percentage of the customers that have left have we contacted? What are their reasons for leaving? Among the people who stay, what’s their purchase frequency and average order value? Are those numbers growing?

Then maybe we need to fill up the bucket some more. How do we attract new customers? What are our conversion rates on whatever marketing we’re doing? What channels are performing, and which are performing better than others? What’s our ROI on marketing spend? How many prospects are we turning into leads? How many of those are we converting?

Finally, there are some KPI’s that are like chicken soup: they might not help, but they can’t hurt. What is our level of social engagement? Is our brand and/or content being shared? What are our general awareness levels? What is our brand image vs. those of our competitors?

You probably have every one of the pieces of data I mentioned above.  You have a lot more too, although it’s imperative to remember that if it’s not actionable it’s probably not worth bothering about.  Good questions and the data that answer them are the flashlights that help your business find its way in the dark.  Without them, it’s way too easy to get lost.

Is that helpful?

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October 2, 2015 · 11:21 am

Old Food

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week is centered on aging. I realize that the topic of “old food” might not seem very appealing, but the reality is that you want some things to be old. OK, I guess “aged” seems a nicer way to put that.

Very few red wines, for example, are meant to be consumed “young.” Spare me the lecture on how winemakers these days can regulate the tannins to make reds drinkable not long after vintage. Really good reds need some time to mellow and develop flavor.

English: A glass of red wine.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You’d rather eat “old” (read aged) beef. Most great steakhouse dry-age beef. They expose big cuts to air so dehydration can further concentrate the meat’s flavor. It’s expensive: the meat loses weight from dehydration, and it also must be trimmed of its completely dried exterior before cooking. The process develops flavor and allows enzymes naturally present in the meat to break down the muscle tissue.

We eat “new” cheese – there is nothing better than fresh mozzarella di buffala. That said, one cheese place I go asks you what you’re doing with the mozzarella (eating it as is or cooking with it) so he can give you the cheese of the correct age. Older, drier mozzarella is better for cooking, after all.  You wouldn’t want to eat most other great cheeses right after they’re made.

So why all the thinking about old food? Because there is something to be learned from it that can be applied to business. We live in a time when things happen really quickly.  There are tons of new ideas that become new businesses.  There is a lot to be said for letting those ideas age a bit before acting on them.  I realize that sometimes there is a limited window of opportunity, but think about how often we put out version 1.0 of something (and I mean that in a broader sense than software) only to realize we could have made it better or found more bugs.  Had we let the product age, it probably would have been better.

We do that with people too.  We cherish the new (read young). Speaking as a veteran (aged!) executive, we tend to have broader perspectives that have been formed through both success and failure.  While it’s often said that one business or another is a young person’s business, most of those young people have older advisors, especially in their early and mid stages.

I know that foods have expiration dates and that they become unpalatable if not inedible.  A little aging – a little time – does, however, seem to help most foods and ideas.  Let that thought age a bit…

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September 25, 2015 · 9:03 am

Searing Off The Truth

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week revolves around searing meat.  One thing I was told early on in my cooking education was to sear off meat before using it in a dish.  This would have the effect of locking in the juices so that the meat doesn’t get dry during cooking.  I guess this was cooking “knowledge” that had been put forth a hundred or so years before I heard it.  If you’ve ever heard the term “cauterization” you’ll understand the thinking.  Just as a doctor can cauterize a wound, burning the flesh to seal it shut, so too did a cook lock in juices by searing off the meat, creating a barrier that kept the meat moist.  

If you go back in cooking history, you hear this “truism” repeated over and over.  As you can tell from my use of quotation marks, the truism isn’t remotely true.  No, this is not going to be another screed about not trusting all the so-called truths, especially not in a world where everything you knew yesterday might not be true today.  Instead, I’d like us to think about how a food scientist named Harold McGee figured out that the “truth” wasn’t.

I’ll quote from a book called The Food Lab (which, by the way, is quite a wonderful read if you’re a combination of geek and cook):

You’d think that with all that working against him, McGee must have used the world’s most powerful computer, or at the very least a scanning electron microscope, to prove his assertion, right? Nope. His proof was as simple as looking at a piece of meat. He noticed that when you sear a steak on one side, then flip it over and cook it on the second side, juices from the interior of the steak are squeezed out of the top—the very side that was supposedly now impermeable to moisture loss!

In other words, he looked at the facts and came to his own conclusion about things.  He didn’t rely on what others had to say on the matter; he gathered his own information and came to his own conclusions based on what he could observe with his own eyes.  The answer was staring him in the face.

That’s how we all need to be doing things in business (and, with an election looming, in the non-business world too!).  We need to be open to the answers that become obvious as we look into things ourselves.  Who knows – we might lose some intellectual baggage while gaining valuable insight.  Worth a shot?

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