Tag Archives: business thinking

June 4, 2015 · 9:50 am

Where The Devil Lives

I received an email this morning which asked me to enter a sweepstakes. Since it involved golf I was all ears and quickly filled out the form – name, and email. This led me to a second form which read “Just answer the following four questions and your entry wil (sic) be complete.” Let’s put aside the typo for a second. That request was followed by a form with three questions, not four. After scratching my head, I answered and received a confirming email. That read, in part, “We’re announcing the winner July 31, 2015, until then we wanted to let you know how you can start…” Another typo/grammatical error.

I can hear some of you saying “stop being so picky.” Here is the problem and it’s one that affects anyone in business. These mistakes demonstrate a complete lack of attention to detail. They have me asking myself if I want to do business with this company and would I trust them with my personal information? If you’ve ever run a sweepstakes you know that everything must be scrutinized carefully – the FTC and others are NOT happy when you mess something up. Multiple people must have reviewed these materials and yet…

Ask yourself how many pitch decks you’ve seen with typos or errors in grammar. Then ask yourself how many websites you read with the same sorts of mistakes. I get apps updating every day for “bug fixes.” Sometimes they’re just fixing things that should have been caught in the testing and quality control phases of development.  You can’t QC something by releasing it, not if you expect to keep a customer base.

I don’t mean to be harsh here but the devil really is in the details. To me this stuff is like going on a job interview dressed in a t-shirt and cutoffs. It’s a horrible first impression, one that is usually disqualifying.

As businesspeople, standards are one of the few things we CAN control.  We need to make sure everyone on the team is clear about the standards and then we need to hold them to those standards, especially when we’re dealing with marketing materials or anything else destined for external viewing.

Details matter.  You can call that picky.  I call it putting your best foot forward.  Do you agree?

1 Comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,

June 3, 2015 · 1:01 pm

GenY And Their Managers

If you follow tech at all you’re probably aware that Mary Meeker‘s annual report on the state of digital came out a couple of weeks ago.  It’s always a great read and gives excellent thinking on where we’re all heading on the technology front.  As an aside, by now I hope we all recognize that no matter what business we’re in, what’s happening with the internet and with technology will affect us, so this is probably worth a few minutes of reading.

Buried in the report is a nugget that’s our topic today.  It has to do with what young employees ages 18-34 (often called GenY or Millenials) want out of their jobs vs. what their managers believe those Millennials want.  The differences are startling and I believe have great implications.  Let’s see what you think.

If you have a look at the chart, you’ll see that managers are pretty clueless.  They believe that most younger employees are after big bucks while the truth is that only 27% of actual Millennials report that as an important factor.  Granted, the data is a couple of years old but I doubt things have changed very much.  Where the Millennials say they want “meaningful work” and the importance they place on feeling a “sense of accomplishment,” mangers dismiss those factors as being important almost entirely. Quite the disconnect.

I suspect that this is due to a couple of things.  First, I’ve known many managers who rarely interact with people several layers “beneath” them.  Maybe a “hello” at a holiday party is as close as they get.  One could write that off to the demands of the job and the lack of time in the day.  That’s crap – you need to make an effort and the people who make the actual work happen are worth the effort.

More importantly, I suspect that for many of these disconnected managers this is how they treat their customers as well.  They don’t make an effort to understand the truth about their customers’ needs and wants, believing that they have a full understanding already.  And we wonder why businesses fail…

What your staff wants, how they value work, and how their priorities might differ from yours is something about which you shouldn’t be guessing.  Are you?

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , ,

May 29, 2015 · 9:14 am

Big Food

This Foodie Friday, let’s talk about Big Food. No, not the somewhat passé trend of stacking a dish’s components into a tower. Big Food – the large food processors who account for a lot of what we have in our homes and, eventually, in our stomachs. There is a revolution going on and it’s one that provides some guidance for all of us no matter what our business may be.

You saw another manifestation of the revolution in this week’s announcement by Taco Bell and Pizza Hut that they will be phasing out artificial ingredients in their food. McDonald’s is getting rid of antibiotics and Subway will be making their bread without some unpronounceable substance which has been called the “yoga mat chemical”. I’m assuming those things got there to begin with in an effort to make the products more consistent, less expensive to produce, and more appealing. All of those reasons are kind of selfish when you think about it. They help the company while putting the long-term health of their customers at risk.

If you want an in-depth discussion of what’s going on with Big Food, Fortune has an excellent, well-researched piece which you can read here. It contains this quote from a Hershey executive:

Research had found that 68% of global consumers wanted to recognize every ingredient on the label, and 40% desired food made with as few ingredients as possible. “There is a connection in consumers’ minds between overall health, wellness, and knowing exactly what I’m eating,” says Hershey’s head of global R&D Will Papa. “Consumers want treats, and they want to know that the treat is really good and wholesome.”

Consumers are not just giving that lip-service. Organic food sales more than tripled over the past decade and increased 11% last year alone to $35.9 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association. And one analyst said that the top 25 U.S. food and beverage companies have lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share since 2009.

Why is this important to your business? It demonstrates how we all need to be in lock-step with the changing priorities of our customers. It might be easy to write off a decline in sales to a bad quarter or the weather. It takes foresight and guts to recognize a shift in tastes (pun intended) and to disrupt everything from product formulation to your supply chain.  Good companies might look to maintain sales and profits by cutting costs or running promotions.  Great companies listen to their customers and respond.  Which are you?

Leave a comment

Filed under food

Tagged as , , , , ,