Category Archives: Business

3 Types Of People You Just Can’t Forget

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I got to reminiscing over the last 6 months at my job. I’ve seen several hundred customers come and go but only remember maybe 20 names. So I asked myself if I could group them into categories to figure out what made them so special, I came up with 3 groups that contain them.

Douchebags

These are the guys that do pretty much anything to make your job just a bit harder. They can be overly pushy when you tell them that you’re unable to assist them. They will do anything to get what they want and don’t give a damn whether it’s possible on your end, but their persistence though annoying sticks with you. You use them to benchmark  your other customers. These guys stick out because they ruffle your feathers and they just beckon to be remembered.

Nice Guys

This group you don’t want to forget because they are the few people who can brighten your day up. They can call you up on short notice and you don’t have anything for them that’s decent but they are happy to take what you have to offer and so glad that you could get them out of there bind. I had one guy, Mr. Bruce, that wouldn’t stop smiling it was just so remarkably odd, normally I see people who are upset because they got into an accident or their flight was canceled. These are the people you want to come back again and again just so they can cheer you up.

Frequenters

These people come in maybe once every month or two and setup there reservations before they ever leave. You get to know exactly what they want when they show up. You really don’t want to forget frequenters because they are probably 20-30% of your business in my small town. You can’t offend them because they will go to your competitors and are unlikely to come back.

These are the 3 groups that I just can’t forget, I know them all by name and see someone from one of these groups atleast once per week. One thing about these groups though is that they aren’t self contained, I’ve got frequent nice guys and frequent douchebags. I’ve also managed to get a nice douchebag, I assume it’s just because I’m not used to the abrasiveness of people from NYC, they don’t come to small town West Virginia that often.  I bet if you wanted you could even make your self unforgetable by mixing them with your own style.

Technology Is Killing Our Time Of Marvel

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What’s the most interesting thing that you’ve marveled over in the last month? last week? last day? I’d bet most of you picked different things for each one. Just think about how fast information is flowing through your media streams; you have less and less time to marvel over something.

As technology makes more and more information available to you at an ever greater speed, your time to marvel over the latest design or innovative idea shrinks. Look at just about any area that your interested in. Now, think back to last year and what you were amazed by in that area and what your amazed by this year, last year’s seems pretty bland in comparison, right? How many times were you amazed by the changes that took place throughout the year in that area? Depending on your source for information it would probably change once a month, once a week, once a day.

Now let’s go back and look at what would have been a marvel to people throughout the 20th century,  a lot of what I’m basing this paragraph on is the image from Visualizing Economics.   The most marvelous things at the turn of the century had very little competition, due to less information for the masses. It took cars 15 years to reach 20% usage and during the same period electricity reached only 30% of the nation. These would have been marvelous utilities to have could you afford them.

As time goes on the different media streams come along that hasten the usage and acceptance I figure a ~20% usage rate as the reduction to marvel. The radio comes along and reaches 20% in just 5 years but allows other forms of media, such as television, computers, the internet, to develop more quickly than had been possible before.  B/W and Color televisions both took ~5 years to reach the threshold, computers took about 20 years and the internet roughly 10.

If you look at how fast we find new marvels today it takes between 1-5 years for nearly anything to reach the  20% threshold. Also, with each new advance in media we find that it loses it’s marvel much quicker than before because there are many more things to marvel at, which reduces the threshold to about 10% currently. As more and more new things come around we have less and less time to spend marveling over it.

This ever increasing pace that removes our abilities to attach to something for a long period of time is going to make it harder and harder for businesses to become a Goliath. This has already started to show in weak returns for advertising and purchasing of slower media types, such as newspapers and magazines. In the very near future you will have to come out with something that will blow everyone away as quick as possible  you don’t have the time to wait and become a Microsoft or Google.

Would love to hear your opinions in the comments about what you think of this idea.

Owning Your Brand

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Had a discussion on Twitter over how much you would pay for your brand and the reasons why you would want to own it. Today, with the internet everyone can own his/her brand, but with the brand comes the brand identity across the board which you might not be able to capitalize on if someone else already has it. Now it’s important to possess your name across the major urls and also across the major social media spectrum. There are 4 major reasons that you would want to own your brand across the board.

1. Easy to Find: Sharing an unanimous identity across the spectrum means that people only need to know that one aspect to find you on their favorite service. This makes it easier for you to not ostracize your followers by not being where they feel comfortable.

2. Reputation Proceeds You: If someone knows you from another service it will make it easier for you to gain following as you enter a new service. You also will have a beacon set up for when followers from another service come looking for you.

3. Protection From Miscreants: This is probably one of the big ones in this day and age. If someone shares the name with you and they do something that could only be viewed in a negative light; they are going to hurt your brand.

4. Multiple Connection Points: You can connect with people on multiple fronts in a multitude of ways. This provides heightened connectivity with those around you. Allows you to create deeper relationships that connecting on only one front.

5 Life Lessons You Can Learn From Poker

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I used to play a lot of poker, but I quit while I was trying to bring my grades back up and also had a long streak of losses. Recently, I began playing about 2-3 games a week just for fun and realized that a lot of what I’ve learned about business, entrepreneurship, and finance are key to the game. You don’t have to play poker to understand these principles that make it easier to be a winner in life and on the felt.

  1. Bankroll Management:This is definitely one of the largest keys to the game of poker, making sure you can still be in the game when your opportunity arises. The concept is that your allowing yourself to achieve the maximum value at the lowest risk possible. If your good at managing your stack you can take a small stack and still come out on top, do the same with your skills, talents, and money and you will can build a great life. This is the foundation that you build off of.
  2. Aggressively Take Chances: The more you risk in the early stages the easier it will be to recoup losses or exploit your massive advantage in mid- and late-game. This becomes especially true if you are good at managing your bankroll.
  3. Know When to Back Down: The corollary to number 2, being aggressive can put your in a winning position in most situations, but if you get cocky you might end up losing everything. You may scare away the source of your income. It’s up to you to toss a few hands, either due to the fact that your hand sucks or just to provide an incorrect position to your competition.
  4. Opportunities are not Rare: Yes, this may not be 100 percent true in life; it is in poker though.  Every hand your dealt is an opportunity to advance, in life you have probably on average one opportunity every day. The problem is that most people don’t have the skills to see opportunities in their peripheral, only the obvious ones that stand out right in front of them.
  5. Luck is a Factor: Every person is dealt a different starting hand, sometimes you will be beat before you ever see your hand. The only thing that you can do is try to take advantage of what you’ve been giving.

The World We Take For Granted

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Going to give you a choice, if you don’t care about the little details about my world all you have to do is read the first paragraph and the last paragraph. I’ve made it easy and quick for you.

How often do you take note of the world around you and its details of what it has offered the world? I come from Lewisburg, a small town of less than 8000 people, in West Virginia, that has been the center of so much I was shaken by the fact. Mind you I’ve lived here nearly 20 years and knew most of these things but, never really gave a damn. Then everything just starts to fall in and you realize that it isn’t as small as you once thought.

It’s amazing how people can change a town’s history. This kind of kicked off last week when I heard someone at work mention Seth McClung, the Brewers relief-pitcher. Today, Patch Adams, the one the movie was based on, came through our airport on his way to his property a few miles down the road. There was also Bimbo Coles, retired basketball player for several NBA teams and on the 1988 Olympic team. Mason Patrick, a major general, highest rank military officials had received during his time period(1918-1927) received his brigadier general and major general status within a one month period.

The town and surrounding area also have quite the history. The area was a very intensely disputed area during the Civil War with a cavern that was used as a salt-peter mine and multiple battle grounds within the area. Just on the edge of the town is a cemetery with unmarked Confederate soldiers. We have the one of the only continuously used Carnegie Halls in the world and it is also booked with world renowned acts though at a less frequent pace than the one located in New York, for obvious reasons. The Greenbrier Resort, the famous government bunker and the host of the first Ryder Cup, lies just a few miles away.

Almost all the people who have lived here all their life know about these things, though some are hidden just off the beaten path, even for regulars. Those that have moved here probably know of the big ones like Carnegie Hall and the Greenbrier. Look around your town, city, or even neighborhood, you never know what you might find out about your community and it’s history.

Honestly, this post wasn’t about what we have it’s about not caring enough to realize what you have. The little things in life are what truly matter, even if you don’t notice them. Little things may be something huge and astounding to someone who doesn’t experience them every day.