Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

Attract Customers and Make Yourself Famous

Strange Bedfellows

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They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, but it can also make for strained relationships with customers, vendors and others. There are hotly-contested elections underway in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere around the world, with emotions running high on all sides.

You may have strong opinions about politics and other social issues. In fact, I hope you do. However, injecting them into your business relationships will probably not win any converts to your positions and may result in harming those relationships.

I participate in several online discussion lists, including one in particular where the political talk gets intense and even downright nasty. I’ve lost respect for some people I had previously thought wise because of their insistence on aggressively promoting their positions and lack of tolerance for the ideas of others.

Get involved in the issues important to you. Make contributions, volunteer, and do what you can to make a difference. But it is usually best to avoid injecting politics into your daily business activities.

Perfekt!

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striving for perfectionAre you obsessed with getting everything just right? Do you do everything yourself because no one else can do it as well as you can? Do you believe that everything you do has to be absolutely perfect? Although striving for excellence is a good thing to do, demanding perfection in everything you do is not.

Often, perfectionism is a way to delay taking action. If you keep finding problems to fix, you don’t have to do something you dread (such as making sales calls) or subject yourself or your product to the judgments of the marketplace.

Realize and accept that good enough is often good enough. There is a point of diminishing returns, where the time and effort you put in to “improving” something is not worth the cost. The cost is not just the cost of doing something over and over. It includes opportunity cost. Every day that you don’t have your product available for purchase, or every day you delay your new marketing program, is a day you are losing sales. And all of the time you put in doing something over and over again is time you could spend doing something more productive and more profitable.

Perhaps what you are trying to make perfect is something that will evolve over time. Your web site doesn’t have to be the ultimate web site the day you put it up on the Web. It should be attractive and free of obvious mistakes. The less-obvious mistakes can be fixed and you can always add new sections and content.

If you find it hard to let go of your quest for perfection, get help from someone you trust. Ask them to look at something you’ve done and help you decide if it’s good enough. They may catch something you didn’t, and really make it better. And, they will let you know when it is time to let go and move on to the next imperfect project!

What to Do With Doo?

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Diane Rossi was making a living cleaning up dog doo from backyards, apartment courtyards and other locations. She had managed to attract hundreds of clients, but faced the problem common to many service providers: She was limited in how much she could earn based on how many hours she could work.

Rossi expanded and hired part-time help, but had a hard time keeping reliable people (apparently the glamour wasn’t enough!) Finally, though, she hit on a solution that may take her from struggling service provider to successful entrepreneur. Rossi began selling rolls of biodegradable dog-waste bags. After selling to many of her apartment building clients, she landed a big contract with the City of Chicago. She plans to expand her sales beyond the Chicago area to increase her revenues and profits.

You can overcome the income limitations of a service business by (1) duplicating yourself by hiring others to perform the service under your direction or franchising your operations, (2) finding a way to package and sell your service to many, such as writing a book or creating audio tapes, training programs, how-to kits and other ways to market your knowledge, or (3) creating a product related to your business like Rossi did.

Diane Rossi may have come up with a winner with her new kind of doggie bags. But she’s not finished. Dog doo treated with heat and enzymes can be turned into fertilizer. Says Rossi, “For me to take the poop and sell it back, that’s the ultimate.”